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Iraqis consider return home: 'Maybe in a million years'

Of the 2-million that have left since the war started, nearly half went to Jordan.

By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN
Published March 4, 2007

AMMAN, Jordan - From that awful February day last year when Sunni insurgents blew up a Shiite shrine, Mouner Obady and Basim Neame knew they were marked men.

Shiites swiftly struck back, burning dozens of Sunni mosques including the one in Baghdad where Obady and Neame served as imams. Neame's house was torched. Someone threw a bomb into Obday's kitchen. Snipers almost killed him.

Of the 11 imams in the mosque, eight were dead by fall. It was time to get out of Iraq.

Today, Obady, his wife and five children crowd a small apartment in Amman, Jordan's capital. Neame lives next door with his own large clan. The building has 17 apartments; 15 are occupied by Iraqis.

"It is difficult for Iraqis to leave their families and cities," says Neame, whose oldest son is still in Baghdad. "Egyptians, they are travelers, they don't mind going for years and years to someplace else. But even if it's only a short time, I miss my home so much."

Since the war began four years ago this month, up to 2-million Iraqis have fled their violent, chaotic country. The diaspora has spread throughout much of the region, with Iraqis now living in Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Syria and Lebanon.

Nearly half, though, have come here to Jordan, a small Sunni Arab country, and the influx has meant huge changes for refugees and hosts alike.

Musical voices

Amman, which a BBC reporter once called a "stultifyingly boring city," is brimming with new restaurants, malls and five-star hotels. Construction cranes loom over rapidly expanding neighborhoods of luxury villas and apartments. Arab cafes now compete with Starbucks.

"Many Iraqis have money. They're making their own businesses," says Diaa Halasa, a Jordanian architect.

The phenomenon is a reversal from the '80s, when thousands of Jordanians went to Iraq to work or to study in what were then some of the Mideast's finest universities. Halasa met his Iraqi wife, Raida, while both were at Mosul University.

Now, Halasa keeps bumping into Iraqi friends from school who have moved to Jordan. His wife loves to visit Amman's new Mecca Mall because she sees so many of her countrymen and women.

"It's like hearing music when they speak," she says.

But with all the newcomers, traffic is terrible. Prices have soared for everything from meat to diapers to real estate. Friction is growing between lower-income Iraqis and Jordanians, who compete for scarce jobs and affordable housing.

And why, Jordanians wonder, should their oil-poor country of 6-million bear so much of the burden of helping refugees from a war started by a rich Western nation? The United States, which has taken in fewer than 500 Iraqis since 2003, recently agreed to accept 7,000 more - still minuscule compared to Jordan's share.

"I do not advocate closing the doors and rejecting those who fled Iraq to save their lives or for political belief," Jordan Times columnist Fahed Fanek wrote. "But it has to be stressed that Jordan is entitled to compensation from the power that is legally and morally responsible for causing the massive migration of the Iraqis."

$12 a day

Ahmed and Sara Jabar were among the first to move to Jordan, soon after the Americans captured Baghdad in 2003 and the city descended into a hell of looting and thuggery.

They found a $105-a-month walkup in a run-down building, its dim halls littered with trash and broken glass. But "the most important thing is to feel secure," says the 31-year-old Ahmed. "The rest you can manage."

Until a year ago, he worked as a taxi driver ferrying other Iraqis from Baghdad to Amman. One day, Jordanian authorities refused to let his passengers enter, so they turned back toward Baghdad. Near Ramadi, the taxi came under fire.

Five passengers were killed. One passenger and Jabar survived, though he was in a coma for two months. Bullets broke his right leg and three bones in his face.

When he recovered well enough to walk, albeit with metal pins in his leg, Jabar got a job in a bakery. He makes $12 a day, barely enough for food and rent. And not nearly enough for the $250 taxi ride to the Iraqi border, 200 miles away. The Jabars have only a three-month residency permit, meaning every 90 days they are supposed to go back to Iraq and re-enter Jordan.

The latest three months were up Feb. 14. As long as they don't cause trouble, the authorities won't bother them, the couple hope.

It is rare to find an Iraqi here who hasn't lost someone to the mayhem back home, and the Jabars are no exception. In September, Ahmed Jabar's brother disappeared. He had been married three months.

In October, Sara's nephew and niece were killed in a suicide bombing. He was 14. She was 10.

Do the Jabars think they will ever return to Iraq?

"No," says Sara.

"Maybe in a million years," says Ahmed.

'Too crazy'

Nader, an obstetrician, was in the second wave of refugees, which arrived in 2005 when insurgents began targeting doctors and Christians. He, wife Lamees and their three children left a large Baghdad house for a tiny apartment whose main decor is a cookie tray shaped like a Christmas tree.

"We brought only our clothes," Lamees says. "It was difficult at the beginning."

She and her husband didn't want their last name used because he periodically returns to Baghdad to check on his factory there. It is the only one in Iraq that makes injectable penicillin and other antibiotics.

Eager to lure well-off Iraqis like Nader, the Jordanian government offers permanent residency to "investors" who pay at least $70,000. Nader did, and is waiting for a license to build a factory here. It has been four months and he's restless. He spends hours on his computer trolling the Internet for news about Iraq.

Lamees tried teaching in a private school in Amman but quit after a few days because "the kids were too crazy." Now she, too, is at home most of the day, watching TV with 3-year-old Linda while the older kids attend Catholic school.

The family goes to church on Sundays and celebrated Christmas with a plastic tree. They have befriended other Iraqis, including a woman who makes qobba, a tasty Iraqi meat dish.

But in many ways, they still feel like tourists. They are bitter about a war that has driven them from home, maybe permanently.

"What more does Bush want from Iraq?" Lamees asks. "He's made 2-million refugees from Iraq, he took our oil, he destroyed the infrastructure."

A dangerous name

The most recent tide of refugees carried in Iraqis like Obady and Neame, whose Sunni mosque in Baghdad is now just a memory. They partly blame the Americans for the sectarian violence threatening to tear apart Iraq.

"America needs to understand that even if there is resistance among Sunnis, it doesn't mean all Sunnis are terrorists," says Neame. "Until now they consider Sunnis terrorists and support the Shiites."

For a time, Neame worked with Americans, serving as a member of the Baghdad Municipal Council. But with Iraq led by a Shiite-controlled government, he sees little future for Sunnis.

Here in Amman, he finds the days long. He constantly worries about his 19-year-old son Omar, who was denied entry to Jordan when the family moved.

With many Jordanians sympathetic to anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq, authorities "consider the age between 18 and 35 a critical age, when they might be targeted to do things," Neame says. So his son remains in Baghdad, confined to his grandparents' house because "Omar is a Sunni name and it is dangerous to have that name in Iraq now."

It didn't used to matter if you were Sunni or Shiite, Obady says. As proof, he points to his 5-year-old twin sons - one is Omar, the other, Ali, a Shiite name.

The two imams consider themselves among the more fortunate of Iraqi refugees because the Sunni religious community in Iraq is still paying their salaries. Obady is working on a doctorate in Islamic religion at a college in Amman, and hopes to be an imam again in his native country.

He has been back only once, in January, to join other Iraqis making the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.

He never left the airport in Baghdad. He was too frightened to step outside.

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 4, 2007, 00:29:14]