(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 was besetting Jordan, Iraqi refugees waited in vain for the situation in Iraq to improve, and many became increasingly desperate. Rana, a mother of three children, and her husband had hired a smuggler to take them from Mosul to Europe but found themselves stranded in Istanbul. Rana supported herself and her children with her modest earnings as a hairdresser in Tarlabaşi, one of Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods. Her husband worked as a day laborer. Their situation was made more precarious by having been denied refugee status in Turkey. Things got worse when Rana’s husband eventually abandoned the family. She and her children moved in with an elderly couple, paying daily for room and board. She and her children found themselves homeless when they were locked out of their apartment after she fell three months behind in her rent. Eventually Rana and her children returned to Iraq. The charity that had helped Rana in Istanbul eventually lost all contact with them, their fate unknown.
Like Rana, many Iraqis were desperate enough to attempt reaching Europe via Turkey. Suha’s brother Daoud, after fleeing to Syria, tried several times to join family in France and Finland. The border crossing from Turkey to Greece at the Evros River, used by smugglers, however, was heavily guarded. Daoud was caught both times trying to cross into Greece, each time being sent back to Turkey. He finally returned to Syria to rejoin Suha and Aodish.
The reason Iraqis risked taking the smuggling routes to Europe was because Germany, Sweden, and Denmark had by this time well-established diasporas of Iraqis. Previously liberal refugee policies in the European Union (over 50 percent asylum recognition rates for Iraqis) had allowed significant numbers of asylum seekers temporary and permanent protection during the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars. Ibrahim’s sister and her family, fearing that Saddam Hussein was on a collision course toward another war, left Iraq in 1997 for Yemen, where they applied for asylum at the German consulate and arrived in Germany in 2000. Germany had by that time granted asylum to over fifty thousand Iraqis who had fled during and after the Gulf War.32 Sweden already had close to one hundred thousand Iraqi immigrants and gave asylum to over thirty thousand more from 2003 to 2007, the proportional equivalent of the US accepting five hundred thousand refugees.33
Asylum had been applied liberally by European countries to Iraqis fleeing Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Hence, after the overthrow of Hussein by the coalition forces, asylum acceptance rates for Iraqis in some of the major destination countries in Europe dropped, and even some Iraqis who had made it to Europe were later deported when their asylum claims were rejected.34 Unfortunately, the EU at this time, unlike the US, did not have formal refugee relocation programs for those fleeing countries like Iraq. Instead EU countries processed asylum seekers as they arrived as irregular migrants.35 Reaching Europe, therefore, meant that Iraqis had to hire a smuggler to take them through Turkey into Greece. As we saw in the case of Suha’s brother, however, Europe had tightened the land border between Greece and Turkey. With the land border with Greece more militarized, Iraqis began attempts to cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey. With their options running out, and resettlement doors still closed, trying to make it to Europe, with all of its risks, was better than doing nothing. If they managed to make it to Greece, then it was northward through the Balkans to Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.
Like the strategic land bridge that Turkey has been for centuries between East and West, it was a key transit country for Iraqis fleeing toward Europe after the Gulf War.36 In Turkey, Iraqis could apply for refugee status with the UNHCR office in Ankara, which gave them legal permission to stay on a temporary basis. Those with refugee status were assigned by Turkish authorities to live temporarily in about fifty “satellite cities” throughout the country to prevent them from congregating in cities that were already crowded with refugees. The downside to this arrangement was that many experienced isolation while they were living within a non-Arabic-language community. To assist them, the US State Department sponsored Turkish-language classes and counselling for people who either suffered during their adjustment to Turkey or who were dealing with trauma associated with their flight from Iraq.
It is not surprising that Iraqis in Turkey found ways to circumvent the satellite-city restriction in order to live at least part of the time in Istanbul, “a place where people find help from those culturally like them,” according to one NGO source.37 The social geography of Istanbul held characteristics vital for Arabic-speaking Iraqis in a Turkish-speaking country—religious communities and family networks provided them a form of contingent belonging and a means of survival while they either waited for resettlement or prepared for the boat crossing into Greece, onward to Europe.
A longer and even riskier route to asylum emerged through Southeast Asia to the shores of Australian territory. In contrast to the US, Australia responded to the postinvasion refugee crisis by formally resettling one to two thousand Iraqis per year beginning in 2004.38 Iraqi refugees coming through Malaysia to Indonesia were trying to rejoin family members in Australia.39 Once they were smuggled into Indonesia, they attempted to hire a small fishing vessel, often captained by a teenage boy, to take them on an uncertain voyage to Australia.40 In a tragic incident on December 15, 2010, twenty-eight people drowned when a boat carrying eighty Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers wrecked on Christmas Island, a territory off the Australian coast close to Indonesia.41
Iraqi “boat people” who did manage to land safely on Australian territory, such as on the rocky shore of Christmas Island, would have found themselves immediately transferred
