These are the people we went to liberate, right?
Oh, how this story saddens me!
"Shiite Refugees Feel Forsaken in Their Holy City" by ALISSA J. RUBIN
NAJAF, Iraq — The men gather somberly at midday on soiled straw mats under a makeshift canvas canopy in a valiant effort to simulate the traditional Arab formal reception room, but here they have no fans to keep the flies from landing, no sweets or tea to offer strangers.
They hoped that this city, holy to their Shiite sect, would welcome them and begin to heal their grief. But instead they have found themselves in a refugee camp outside the city, far from jobs and shops, squeezed five to a tent, sleeping on squalid blankets smelling of sweat, and drinking cloudy brown water hauled from a nearby ditch.
[It's "liberation," Bush-style!]
Most galling for these Shiite refugees is that they feel abandoned by the government, which is run by fellow Shiites.
Issa Mohammed, 47, a dignified man wearing the black checked scarf favored by tribal sheiks, referring to Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki;
“When Maliki came to Najaf he didn’t even come to see the camp; he didn’t even visit his own people.”
The scope of sectarian killings in Iraq and the relocation they have caused have yet to be publicly acknowledged by the Iraqi government. But a visit to Najaf, whose refugee population is typical of the southern provinces, lays bare the vast needs of displaced Iraqis and the rough road ahead for the project of national reconciliation.
In Najaf, estimates of the number of the displaced range from 60,000 to more than 400,000. The official number of displaced is 10,000 families, or 60,000 people, since there are six people on average in an Iraqi family, according to the International Organization for Migration, which works with governments worldwide on refugee issues.
However, numbers are hard to track because some displaced families stay only a few months in one place and then move on. The majority live in squatter villages in the country far from services; there are about 1,700 in the refugee camp.
Because registering with the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration is a difficult process that requires going to Baghdad and presenting several documents that prove former address and family size, only a fraction of those displaced register, according to officials at humanitarian agencies.
In addition, said Kammal Abdul Zahra, the head of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization’s Najaf office, many rural, less-educated people are afraid of being on any official lists, so they do not register with the provincial government, or with any charitable agencies. His guess is that the real figure is closer to 400,000.
That would be a huge increase in Najaf’s population since the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006, which marked the beginning of the mass migrations. Prior to the bombing, Najaf’s population was estimated at about 700,000.
More than 1.1 million Iraqis have been internally displaced, most of them since the time of the bombing, when sectarian violence intensified, according to numbers gathered by the Iraqi Red Crescent and the International Organization for Migration. In addition, at least two million Iraqis have fled the country, with the majority heading to Syria and Jordan.
Najaf is a low-lying city of sand-colored houses that sprawls across the northern tip of the Arabian desert. The golden-domed shrine to Imam Ali, the martyred son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, stands at the center of the old city, a place of narrow alleys lined with religious booksellers and the offices of ayatollahs.
The size of the jump in Najaf’s population would present huge problems for cities in a developed country, let alone a less developed country still recovering from decades of war.
[It's "liberation," Bush-style!]
Daunted by those demands and worried about the effect of the influx on Najaf’s image as a center of Shiite culture, the Najaf Provincial Council decided in the summer of 2006 to stop the refugee flow. They instituted rules requiring newcomers to have at least two members of the Najaf government vouch for them or be turned away.
The effect has been to limit immigrants to those who already have relatives in Najaf.
Abdul Hussain Abtam, the deputy head of the Provincial Council, referring to suppression of much of the city’s Shiite identity under Iraq’s former president, Saddam Hussein:
“The trouble is that we are trying to bring back the identity of Najaf because its society has been disrupted for 30 years. We are trying to make people from Najaf more educated, more organized, but these other people, these displaced people, are making this difficult.”
[It's "liberation," Bush-style!]
In fact, Najaf has a more affluent refugee population than most other areas in the south because of its status as a center of Shiite culture. While a vast majority of refugees are poor, many of them because they had to leave behind everything they own, an estimated 20 percent are part of the middle class and 5 percent are wealthy, according to Red Crescent officials.
At one of Najaf’s two largest hospitals, the director has snapped up 10 surgeons who recently emigrated from Baghdad. The province’s main university at Kufa has employed several professors, refugees from the climate of fear in Baghdad, Mr. Abtam says. Businessmen have come, too, closing up their shops in the capital and transplanting their business.
For a vast majority, however, even those with middle-class origins, flight has brought a profound malaise. They live in smaller houses with more people, patch a living together and have barely enough to feed their families and pay the rent. But few see returning home as an option.
Abu Noor, 47, the refugee camp’s unofficial mayor:
“We have no idea if our houses are still standing. We cannot go back to see because they have killed us and we have killed them.”
Haider Jawad, 32, lived a comfortable life in Baghdad until January, in a sprawling house with room for three families. Then three families in his predominantly Sunni Arab, western Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra received death threats in the form of a note wrapped around a bullet that said, “Leave tomorrow and do not take anything.”
Mr. Jawad, who had supported his family as an auto mechanic when they lived in Baghdad:
“We knew we were going to be next, so my father came to Najaf ahead to arrange a place for the family. But here they made us pay six months’ rent in advance.”
Now, he, his wife and 7-year old son, along with his parents and five other family members, are crammed into a small house on an unpaved side street. The yard is overgrown and strewn with empty plastic water bottles and stray bits of garbage. Some laundry hangs on a line next to the family’s only remaining possession, a satellite dish. The worn furniture inside belongs to the landlord.
[We are turning them into Amurka, all right!
So the war IS A SUCCESS, then, despite the destruction and loss of life, right?]
He tried to start a cellphone business in Najaf and put some of his savings into a small store, but sold few phones. Then he tried to sell satellite television subscriptions, but gave up three months later after selling only one subscription. He is not sure what else to do and his savings have run out.
Mr. Jawad, when asked if he would consider moving back to Baghdad, spoke of a dream, not a plan:
“I can’t run a business here because I don’t know the people. In Najaf everybody pays in installments but I am an outsider and I don’t know whom to trust, who will pay and who will not. If we were to go back we would sell the house and move to one of the predominantly Shiite neighborhoods,. All that has happened — it does something inside you. Besides the fighting and the killing, even when that is over, it will leave something behind. Those around you have lost many family members. You have lost people you love. You cannot just forget that.”
[Do you HEAR THAT, Bush?!?!]
For the family of Salah Abdul Hussain, who now lives in the refugee camp, the feelings of pain and grief are especially raw. A former Iraqi Army corporal, Mr. Hussain lived with his four sons and his wife for nearly 15 years in Habbaniya, a city near Falluja in the Sunni-majority province of Anbar. The city was home to many army families, and they felt comfortable.
After the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra, the atmosphere changed in Habbaniya. One of Mr. Hussain’s sons was attacked by gunmen. That son tried to fight, and two of the other sons, hearing the shots, rushed to help him. The gunmen shot the first son, and he died almost immediately.
[Gunmen = Blackwaters?
Did these things help change the atmosphere, too?
Hey, don't believe me, do your own research.
Asymmetrical Warfare Group
Operation Gladio
Operation Northwoods
Salvador Option,
Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group
Prop 201 tutorial
FRU]
By then the compound where the family lived was largely controlled by militants, and the family knew they had to leave immediately. They called the local sheik, whom they had known for years, and he promised to protect them, and said they should come to his house.
But when they left the compound’s gates, armed men attacked their car. Mr. Hussain was dragged from the vehicle. Two of his sons tried to fight.
Mehdi Saleh al-Ardi, 31, the only surviving son:
“My two brothers were kidnapped and the insurgents beheaded one of them and killed the other. Then they took our two cars and everything we had.”
The family made their way to the sheik’s house, but when they entered his compound they saw some of the same people who had kidnapped their sons a few hours earlier and realized they had been betrayed. They fled Anbar that night.
Weeks later they heard from a friend that their sons’ bodies had been found; Mr. Hussain collected them and buried them in Falluja, in a graveyard for unidentified bodies.
The family quietly presented pictures of their slain boys to a reporter. The bodies are mangled; one boy’s throat is slit and the other is headless. The mother looked away.
Mr. Hussain sighed:
“I would like to go back to Baghdad maybe, but not to Habbaniya. The vengeance killing will continue. But then we cannot stay here. The Najafis call us ‘guests’: How can we say we will stay?”
[Yeah, Iraq is SOOOO MUCH BETTER since asshole invaded!
Pffffffttttt!]
