Iraq: A Displacement Crisis

[tequila]

Syria severely restricts Iraqi refugee influx - Reuters, 3 Sep.

Syria has imposed strict visa requirements on Iraqi nationals, officials said on Monday, cutting the only accessible escape route for thousands of refugees fleeing the upheaval in Iraq.

A government decree that takes effect on September 10 bars Iraqi passport holders from entering Syria except for businessmen and academics, a small minority of the 3,000-5,000 refugees who currently cross the border every day.

Jordan, the other main goal of Iraqi refugees, imposed its own visa requirements some two years ago.

"Syria has already received more than 1.5 million refugees and there could be no end in sight to what the Americans unleashed there. We simply can't cope any more," a Syrian official told Reuters.

The official gave no indication that Syria could force refugees already in the country to leave ...

[Jedburgh]

RFE/RL, 7 Sep 07: Plight of Displaced Worsens

....Syria is currently hosting 1.5 million Iraqi refugees and the Syrian government has indicated that between 30,000-60,000 Iraqis enter Syria every month. The sheer number of Iraqis has become a huge burden on the country's economy and infrastructure. Damascus has estimated that the refugees are costing the state approximately $1 billion a year.

This strain, coupled with the international community's failure to provide adequate financial assistance to Syria, has forced Damascus to take stringent measures to curtail the number of Iraqis pouring into the country. Currently, the country technically has an "open-door" policy that allows most Iraqis to easily enter Syria. Iraqis are initially granted a three-month visa that is easily renewable.

However, starting on September 10 a new visa system will be implemented that will grant visas only to Iraqis involved in the economic, commercial, and scientific sectors. These restrictions will almost certainly limit the number of Iraqis allowed in. Furthermore, the new documents will only be single-entry visas valid for three months and qualified Iraqis must obtain them from the Syrian Embassy in Baghdad.....

[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 ...