Northern Iraq, a region where Assyrian Christians have lived for two thousand years.8 In 1975, Suha and her family moved to the Baghdad suburb of Al Jadeeda for work. It was a mixed community, Sunni, Shi’a, and Christian; according to her father, “They [Muslims] were very kind to us.” Suha managed to complete only third grade before the bombing raids during the Iraq-Iran War, which began in 1980 and prevented her from continuing at school. Suha eventually got married in Baghdad, but her husband died from illness several years later. To support herself, she went to work in a textile factory, where she stayed for seven years.
In 2006, the family’s church, St. Elias Chaldean Parish, was attacked. With the attack on the church and intensification of violence, Christian friends and relatives began to leave the area. In the post-2003 turmoil, already-vulnerable religious and ethnic minorities became even more susceptible to threats, kidnappings, and attacks. Before the major sectarian conflicts broke out, there had already been mass expulsions of Christians from Basra, despite the city being controlled by coalition forces. Suha and her family did not leave. Finally they were the only Christians left in the neighborhood. For many Christians, attacks on churches meant that they were being targeted as a whole group and that the government was unable to protect them. Many felt it was no longer safe for Christians anywhere in Iraq, even in their stronghold of Mosul.9
In 2006, a young man came to the grocery store of Suha’s brother Daoud and delivered a threat, that his sisters should wear hijab and stop attending their church or face the consequences. Daoud threw a can of tomato paste at the young man and told him to get out. The family feared that the young man would return with an armed group. At that point, they knew it was now too dangerous to stay in Iraq. In April, Suha and her father, mother, and older sister drove north through Iraqi Kurdistan and crossed the border into Syria. There they met up with other Iraqi-Assyrian and Chaldean refugees living in northeastern Syria, not far from the Iraqi border. Suha’s father, Aodish, stressed that they did not run away in the middle of the night: “It was six in the morning. We took our time. It was normal.” Daoud and two younger sisters followed soon after.
The diversity of people I interviewed spanned most religious and ethnic groups in Iraq. All left because they were threatened with violence. As one Muslim woman told me, “It didn’t matter which group, Christian or Muslim: they were trying to kill all of us.” The Dutch journalist Geert van Kesteren was told something nearly identical by a woman he interviewed: “There is no end to the list of civilians who are victims and targets of the violence in Iraq; it affects everyone: Muslims—both Sunni and Shia—Mandeans, 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
