Iraqi Refugees in the United States. Ken R. Crane
Yezidis, Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Chaldean Catholics and others.”10 By 2006, the drift into chaos and civil war had left no ethnoreligious or political group untargeted.
The terror unleashed on the Iraqi people reached its zenith in the year of the murder attempt on Suha’s brother in 2006. That year witnessed thirty-four thousand documented killings of Iraqi civilians.11 For each “documented” killing, there were myriad other undocumented events, kidnappings, threats, and killings, particularly of women and children, that went unrecorded.12 Lindsay Gifford found that “all neighborhoods were equally exposed to violence,” rather than official portrayals of places like Sadr City being the locus of violence, an assessment with which my respondents would agree.13
The common perception of the civil war in Iraq is that existing sectarian tensions had been held in check by the repressive regime of Saddam Hussein, simply to rise to the surface after the “liberation” of the country, according to some natural law of nation-building. In fact, the effect of Hussein’s security regime did much to erode civil society and national identity, using factions within the Baath Party apparatus to control dissent. A weak government and the fractured nature of Iraqi society forced people to lean more heavily on localized political actors (tribal leadership and religious authorities) for support, security, and protection.14 In short, consensus has built around the following factors as primary drivers of the communal conflict that ensued after the invasion: the collapse of governance structures, the mismanagement by the occupation and its failure to establish security, massive unemployment after the firing of the armed forces, fears among Sunnis of the new Shi’a-governed Iraq and fear of reprisals against former Baath Party members, and the presence of the US military as a magnet to foreign fighters who poured into the country to join the growing insurgency.15
The reasons behind the postinvasion meltdown will no doubt be debated for years. What is not up for debate is the consequence of the postinvasion violence: a massive displacement of an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people within Iraq and an estimated outmigration of 750,000 and 2 million, respectively, to the neighboring countries of Jordan and Syria.16 Lebanon gave protection to 50,000, Iran to another 48,000, and Turkey to an estimated 18,000.17
Exile and Contingent Belonging
The individuals whom we have followed up to this point—Yousef, Suha, and Ibrahim—survived in these countries by following family and ethnoreligious networks built and expanded by exiles fleeing political unrest and two decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein.18 Constituting a diverse class of people, ranging from butchers and electricians to engineers and doctors, they blended into the informal economies of neighboring countries, like Al-Seida Zeinab district of Damascus, where up to half a million Iraqi refugees lived by 2007.19 Assisted by principles of Arab solidarity, they were commonly referred to not as refugees (a label reserved solely for Palestinians) but as guests—dhuyuf.20
Iraqi social networks throughout the Middle East should not be underestimated as a means of survival during this time. The human capacity to move across borders is largely enabled by social networks, with an internal momentum by which migration becomes progressively easier for successive migrants.21 Social capital, building on the “embeddedness” of social relations within networks—solidarity, reciprocity, and enforceable trust—facilitates mobilization of economic and informational resources.22 Social networks can be translocal, meaning that they are not bounded by borders and allow resources to be mobilized both locally and through transnational relationships.23 The social capital mobilized through Iraqis’ social networks is how they survived outside the confinement of camps. This is not to say that they were shielded from real and consequential hardship: gaps in education for their children,24 working underpaid jobs in the underground economies of surrounding countries,25 and the vulnerability to “survival sex” for war widows and forced marriages for girls.26 In addition, they carried trauma with them from the war and the terrible violence they had witnessed.27
In 2007, the year Yousef and his family left Iraq, no visa was required to cross the Syrian border.28 Yousef and Nuha found protection in Syria but were terribly exploited in the informal economy and faced constant threats of deportation by security police.29 Yousef’s friend in Aleppo helped him find work in a textile factory that made children’s clothes. Yousef, trained as an engineer, now described himself as a “laborer” who worked fourteen hours days for minimal pay. His wife, Nuha, did jewelry piecework from home.
Yousef and Nuha had rented a house in Aleppo for six months, thinking that they would be able to return to Iraq in a few months. Two years later, they were still in Aleppo, where Nuha delivered their youngest child. They had not expected to be in Syria this long. But the news from Iraq still wasn’t good: “We realized that Iraq was moving towards the worst. The situations there were deteriorating. So, with this deterioration, the decision [to seek resettlement] becomes stronger.” Eventually the situation in Aleppo became dangerous, and Yousef and his family had to leave for Damascus, where he managed to find similar work with the help of a cousin while they waited for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to act on their application.
Suha and her father, Aodish, who were also in Syria at this time, found jobs in textile warehouses. Over time, this Chaldean family came to the conclusion that there was no future for Christians in Iraq. All of Aodish’s siblings had by this time left Iraq for Australia, France, Germany, Finland, and the US (San Diego). In 2011, Suha, along with her parents, brother, and sister, traveled to the UN offices in Damascus, where they were interviewed by US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials as part of the arduous security screening process required for resettlement applicants.
Like Yousef and Suha, Ibrahim and his wife, Zaynab, first headed to Syria. Ibrahim had friends in Al-Zabadani, a small city in southwestern Syria, where he had gone once to purchase a car.30 He looked into working at one of the Syrian hospitals but would have only been able to make $200 a month, not enough to live on. They ended up in Amman, Jordan, where a friend from medical school offered Ibrahim work in his private clinic.31 Ibrahim worked there for three months, then was given a final three-month extension.
In Jordan, Iraqis did not have the fear of an impending war but rather a government growing impatient with half a million Iraqi refugees in a country with a total population of only about ten million. Many Shi’a Iraqis felt that the Jordanian government, predominantly Sunni, did not want them in the country. Iraqis in Jordan whose visas had expired were being deported. Ibrahim applied to the UNHCR to receive refugee protection and permission to stay in Jordan without fear of deportation. Two months later, he was told by UNHCR that he could apply for resettlement to the US, where he had relatives.
Ibrahim and Zaynab were ambivalent about applying for resettlement in the US. Ibrahim liked his work and would have preferred to stay in Amman had his “legal residency” been more secure. Even with UNHCR giving Iraqis temporary refugee status, Jordanian refugee policy toward Iraqis was in constant flux. Another difficulty was the education of the couple’s three school-age children—Raiya, Malik, and Masim—whose attendance at a private school was assisted, for the time being, by UNICEF. But how long could that continue?
Having given up hope of returning to Iraq, and with the long-term prospects in Jordan unclear, Ibrahim and Zaynab decided that resettlement was the best option. “USA is not bad. Maybe good. Maybe I suffer also, but its okay, let me try,” Ibrahim reflected. They thought about the long-term prospects for their children’s education. Another strategic thought occurred to them as well, that with US passports they would be “free” to “live anywhere,” and they could finally fulfill their dream of making the pilgrimage to Mecca, a dubious possibility with an Iraqi passport.
Even as the violence in Iraq subsided somewhat after 2007, the conditions that would have allowed Iraqi refugees to rebuild their lives were missing. Ibrahim returned briefly to Baghdad to discover that conditions had not really improved. “The killer,” he said, “was in the street everywhere.” Ibrahim, Yousef, and Suha realized that the Iraq they had known would never return, and probably neither would they. With their old neighborhoods ethnically cleansed and property confiscated, they knew their futures lay outside the Middle East.
As Syria began to slip into its own war, and compassion fatigue