Syria

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. High Commissioner for Refugees and the news media.

Sharify, an official at the Iraqi Embassy here in Syria, helped to organize government-sponsored bus trips at the end of last year that he says carried 420 Iraqi families back to Baghdad. (The United Nations estimates the Iraqi population here at 1.2 million.)

More free rides home are planned, Sharify says. But finding takers is likely to remain a challenge.

DOUMA, Syria - Mustafa Hamad Rassoul doesn't see how his family can survive.

Back in Baghdad, the 55-year-old Iraqi Kurd says, the money he made running a clothing shop was more than enough to house and feed his two wives and 10 children. But here in Syria, where he came last year after being threatened by the Mahdi Army, the food and cash assistance his family receives doesn't last the month.

Rassoul blames the United States.

DAMASCUS, Syria -- These refugees aren't in camps. And that's making it more difficult for aid workers to address their growing needs.

The great majority of Iraqis who have come to Syria have settled in and around the capital. Most have disappeared into the cosmopolitan population of this Middle Eastern hub; many are intentionally keeping their profiles low, for fear of being caught, detained, and sent back to Iraq.

The pattern is the same in Jordan, Lebanon and other Iraqi neighbors.

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.

In Syria, he says, he has left sectarian conflict behind.

"The best thing here is there is no problem between different groups," Dulayme says.

When Iraqis began pouring into Syria two and a half years ago, authorities here feared that they would bring their country's sectarian divide with them.

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.

Imran Riza, the representative in Amman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, discusses the challenges facing Iraqis in Jordan, and the ways in which they differ from more traditional refugees.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC

The news today that nearly 100 Sudanese refugees in Iraq now are headed to Romania highlights the plight of a particularly vulnerable group: Those who were already refugees in Iraq when the war triggered the current crisis.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees announced on Monday that it had referred its 50,000th Iraqi for resettlement. Buried in the press release is the story of another refugee facing a horrible dilemma.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Baltimore, MD

I was invited to dinner last night by a family that in some ways typifies the Iraqi resettlement experience.

Abu Rawan is a 62-year-old engineer who served as an interpreter and adviser to U.S. commanders and diplomats after the 2003 invasion. His wife is a pediatrician; they have two sons, aged 13 and 14.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC

After admitting record numbers of Iraqi refugees in the final months of fiscal 2008, the United States is off to a slow start in the first months of the fiscal '09.

The country admitted 705 Iraqis as refugees in October and 738 in November, according to numbers released last week by the State Department. That's a steep decline from the more than 2,000 per month who landed here in July, August and September.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC

Iraqi lawmakers are seeking $4 billion in next year's national budget to assist the more than 4 million Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons.