JARAMANA, Syria -- Hasem Abed is thinking about going back to Iraq.
The small-time auto trader, 32, left Diyala earlier this year after members of a Shia militia destroyed his house.
Syria and Jordan: The Iraqi Exodus
It's not that Muhammad Shumri imagined building a new life in Baltimore would be easy. But he didn't expect it to be so hard.
WASHINGTON -- After a stranger snapped her photograph as she entered the Green Zone, Tina Raad's family begged her to get out of Iraq.
DAMASCUS, Syria -- Adnan al-Sharafy sees a few obstacles holding up the return of Iraqi refugees to their home country: the U.S. military, the U.N.
DOUMA, Syria - Mustafa Hamad Rassoul doesn't see how his family can survive.
DAMASCUS, Syria -- These refugees aren't in camps. And that's making it more difficult for aid workers to address their growing needs.
AMMAN, Jordan - Najim Abid Hajwal has been having a difficult time renewing his passport.
SAIDA ZAINAB, Syria - As a Sunni Muslim married to a Shia, Hamid Al Dulayme was threatened by both sides in Baghdad. When militia members broke into his house in 2005, he fled Iraq.
AMMAN, Jordan -- Najim Abid Hajwal thought he would be back in Baghdad by now.
The 49-year-old businessman fled Iraq after a worker in one of his factories warned that his name had appeared on a local hit list. He needed no convincing: By then, he says, two of his sons had narrowly escaped kidnappers, and a brother and a nephew had been shot to death.
Still, he expected the exile to be brief. Packing up his wife and their seven children, he imagined a sojourn lasting weeks.
That was four years ago.
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Matthew Hay Brown is a Washington correspondent for The Baltimore Sun. He has reported in English and Spanish from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East; he has written...