Iraq: A Displacement Crisis

[tequila]

Migration reshapes Iraq's Sectarian Landscape - NYTIMES, 18 Sep.

A vast internal migration is radically reshaping Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian landscape, according to new data collected by thousands of relief workers, but displacement in the most populous and mixed areas is surprisingly complex, suggesting that partitioning the country into semiautonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy.

The migration data, which are expected to be released this week by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization but were given in advance to The New York Times, indicate that in Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families.

The figures show that many families move twice, three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger and then making more considered calculations based on the availability of city services or schools for their children. Finding neighbors of their own sect is just one of those considerations.
Over all, the patterns suggest that despite the ethnic and sectarian animosity that has gripped the country, at least some Iraqis would rather continue to live in mixed communities ...

[slapout9]

Good post tequila. On another thread we had a discussion about metrics in COIN ops and how well you are doing. Displacement of people is a very good measure of EFFECT on the population. Time to activate plan TROUFION

[Jedburgh]

BBC, 10 Oct 07: Doors Closing on Iraqi Displaced

A growing number of Iraqi provinces are refusing entry to internal refugees, the UN refugee agency has warned.

The head of the UNHCR Iraq Support Unit told the BBC up to 11 governors were restricting access because they lacked resources to look after the refugees.

Andrew Harper warned that, with no imminent end to the displacement, Iraq was becoming a "pressure cooker".....

[Jedburgh]

Chatham House, Oct 07: Iraq-The Refugees: The Other Surge

....It seems ironic that the countries which most clearly opposed the United States invasion, like Jordan and Syria, are the ones that are accepting and paying for the consequences, while Kuwait, which was the only Arab state openly to support Washington, has done very little and will only give selected Iraqis temporary visas at considerable cost. Other Gulf states have received two-hundred thousand refugees and Egypt one-hundred thousand.

Peering inside Iraq we can see the desperate state of the displaced as well as the refugees. Estimates nearly all suggest that over two million souls are migrating from their homes because of violence or intimidation. And of course this is heaped on a legacy of refugee problems dating from the last century: the Ahwazis, the Palestinians, the Turkish Kurds, the Iranian Kurds, the Mujahideen el Khalq, the Sudanese. Indeed population movement in Iraq is not a new phenomenon. What has changed is the scale and the seemingly indiscriminate nature of targeting certain communities.....

[tequila]

Pressure for Results: The Politics of Tallying the Number of Iraqis Who Return Home - NYTIMES, 25 Nov.

At a row of travel agencies near the highway to Syria, the tide of migration has reversed: the buses and GMC Suburban vans filled with people heading to Damascus run infrequently, while those coming from the border appear every day.

By all accounts, Iraqi families who fled their homes in the past two years are returning to Baghdad.

The description of the scope of the return, however, appears to have been massaged by politics. Returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.

...

On Nov. 7, Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the American-Iraqi effort to pacify Baghdad, said that 46,030 people returned to Iraq from abroad in October because of the “improving security situation.”

...

But in interviews, officials from the ministry acknowledged that the count covered all Iraqis crossing the border, not just returnees. “We didn’t ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry,” said Sattar Nowruz, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

As a result, the tally included Iraqi employees of The New York Times who had visited relatives in Syria but were not among the roughly two million Iraqis who have fled the country.

...

A half-dozen owners of Iraqi travel agencies and drivers who regularly travel to Syria agreed that the numbers misrepresented reality.

They said that the flow of returnees peaked last month, with more than 50 families arriving daily from Syria at Baghdad’s main drop-off point. Since Nov. 1, they said, the numbers have declined, and on Sunday morning, during a period when several buses used to appear, only one came.

...

A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.

The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.

Underscoring a widely held sense of hesitation, many of those who come back to Iraq do not return to their homes ...

[Stan]

Nice Post, Tequila !

Joyous photos of Iraqi refugees returning to Baghdad

...in recent weeks have become something of a rallying cry for U.S. and Iraqi officials. Security is on such an upswing, leaders say, families are doing the once unthinkable: they’re coming home.

Definitely good news and a reason to be optimistic; while I would also argue that not all of the folks are returning because they feel the security situation has drastically improved, I would point out that the statistics reflect that people are no longer fleeing Iraq. Often relief agency’s numbers are easily skewed by not calculating that others continue to/or are no longer departing. CNN recently reported that 46,000 have retuned in October, and 10,000 of those to Baghdad. The same reports covered market activity and nightlife returning to the capital.

This U.N. September 2007 report however indicates that an estimated 60,000 Iraqis were still being forced from their homes each month due to violence.

[Creon01]

The UNHCR (not UN) report quoted previously is not accurate regarding the rate of newly displaced Iraqis. The UNHCR does not have any active nationwide systematic monitoring of IDPs ongoing within Iraq. The now defunct UN Cluster F report that is often mislabeled as a UNHCR report relies on data collected by the MoDM, KRG and IOM and has been for some time considered the definitive source of information on Iraqi displacement. The last Cluster F report seems to indicate an ever growing number of IDPs, a theme that is also repeated in their latest funding appeal.

The rate of newly displaced Iraqis is now actually so low in Baghdad that the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration (MoDM) has stopped registering new applications for IDP status in order to catch up with many applications still in the pipeline. The way an Iraqi is registered as an IDP (and becomes eligible for a monthly support grant) is that local, district and then provincial councils have to validate the applicant before MoDM registers the person or family. All the other components of the system are ongoing as the MoDM catches up.

The simple reason for the apparent rise in the total number of Iraqi displaced is that collection efficiencies, the monetary incentives now being offered to register, fewer mixed urban neighborhoods and vastly increased security have generated a frenzy among poor Iraqis to get registered. The MoDM recently issued a clarification that their numbers only reflect the date a person becomes registered as an IDP with the Iraqi government, not the date or rate of displacement.

As for the Iraqi Red Crescent, it has never revealed its methodology regarding how or who they count as IDPs so are not considered as credible by serious humanitarian organizations working in Iraq.

The only organization that actively monitors when an Iraqi becomes displaced, their sectarian affiliation, where they came from and why they fled in the first place is the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Every two weeks they update the data on their web site. IOM does not count every displaced Iraqi nor is that their goal. This organization seeks out the most vulnerable Iraqi IDPs and conducts a monitoring and needs assessment when they find them so they can design and implement a life sustaining intervention, if needed, until the host community or the Government of Iraq can provide the sustainable support. These most vulnerable displaced Iraqis are the ones everyone should be most concerned with not the middle class Iraqis who fled abroad.

The key to understanding the relevance of displacement trends in the current counter-insurgency strategy is that most people will not come back to a place that is not perceived to be secure regardless of any economic or government incentives, and absent extreme coercive methods displacement and returns should be considered as a key indicator of success or failure in any security operation.