Iraq: Refugee crisis continues to mount

February 14, 2008
Issue 

Despite claims by Washington's puppet government in Baghdad that "security" in Iraq has dramatically improved over the past six months, the latest figures compiled by the UN's refugee agency show that many more Iraqis are continuing to flee their war-torn country to neighbouring Syria than are returning.

Agence France Presse reported on February 7 that an internal report prepared by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that in late January an average of 1200 Iraqis fled to Syria every day compared with around 700 who returned. The UNHCR report said that those who are returning say they are doing so more because their Syrian visas have expired or because they have run out of money, rather than because of an improvement in conditions in Iraq.

According to a survey of refugees carried out by the UN refugee agency in Syria, 46% of those seeking to return said they could no longer afford to live in Syria and 25% had seen their visas expire. Most refugees interviewed do not agree that security has sufficiently improved in Iraq.

The BBC World News Service reported on November 21 that the UNHCR "estimates about 45,000 Iraqis returned from Syria in October". Despite also reporting that "the stream of returnees from Syria is not being matched by return traffic from Jordan, where there may be as many as a million Iraqi refugees", the BBC gave its report a pro-war propaganda spin, claiming: "One factor in their return is likely to be a sharp and sustained drop in all kinds of violence, particularly in parts of the capital Baghdad, following a
US-Iraqi military 'surge'."

The US troop "surge", which began in February 2007, boosted the size of the 130,000-strong US occupation force in Iraq over the following four months by 30,000 troops. When US President George Bush announced the troop surge in January 2007, he said it was aimed at disarming Sunni and Shiite "sectarian militias" that were "splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves".

However, as the extra US troops surged into Baghdad they began segregating the city of six million into a series of exclusively Sunni or Shiite enclaves surrounded by 3.5-metre-high concrete walls.

The August 24 New York Times reported that the "number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves ...

"Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February ... The new findings suggest that while sectarian attacks have declined in some neighborhoods, the influx of troops and the intense fighting they have brought are at least partly responsible for what a report by the United Nations migration office calls the worst human displacement in Iraq's modern history."

The "intense fighting" brought about by the influx of US troops was a result of Iraqis' resistance to large-scale US troop assaults into their walled-off neighbourhoods. The Sunni-based Iraqi nationalist resistance groups were estimated in April 2006 by Nawaf Obaid, a security consultant to the pro-US Saudi Arabian government, to have some 70,000 guerrilla fighters, while the Mahdi Army militia of anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr is 60,000-strong.

US and Iraqi officials have claimed that since the surge began the number of Iraqi violent deaths declined by 60% — a claim that UN agencies cannot verify because, since May, the Iraqi health ministry has been banned from providing its raw data to these agencies.

The idea that there has been a drop in US troop and Iraqi civilian deaths as a result of the surge working was given short shrift by retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor — who, at the request of then US war secretary Donald Rumsfield, drew up the initial invasion plan for Iraq in 2002 — in testimony he gave on February 8 to the US House of Representatives' committee on foreign affairs.

Macgregor observed that "it appears to many in the United States and in Iraq, that the true basis for the [Bush] administration's current approach is the popular narrative that Iraq has turned a strategic corner — that suddenly in the space of a few months, after nearly five years of bloody conflict involving the massive loss of Arab life and property, new US counterinsurgency tactics are working and Iraq's Muslim Arab population welcomes the presence of American military power as the guarantor of their future prosperity and freedom.

"Members must understand that this popular narrative is an illusion, one that is likely to vanish as quickly as it was created ... If numbers of troops won [counter-]insurgencies then Vietnam would be the 51st state [of the US] today.

"Since the end of World War II, no Western army has defeated an insurgency without the overwhelming majority of its soldiers coming from the host country. In fact, the very act of flooding the host country with foreign troops always guarantees that the occupied population will never support the foreign invader."

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