Iraq's Forgotten Refugees.

AuthorDiNovella, Elizabeth
PositionEssay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When I walked into Samia Kouzah's dingy two-room flat in Zarqa, Jordan, I almost didn't recognize her daughter as human. Rahma, age twenty months, has a severely deformed skull, shaped like a mushroom, and her eyes bulge out like a cartoon character's.

Samia became pregnant with her daughter while living in Baghdad. She suspects radioactive materials used in U.S. bombs caused the deformities. The doctor who delivered Rahma said she wouldn't live past one year old. In September, Rahma turns two.

Rahma sits on her mother's lap, enveloped in Samia's blue and beige veil, and begins to fuss. "She has a fever," Samia explains. "She's teething."

Samia is a thirty-three-year-old Palestinian woman born in Iraq. She shows me her ID. She is technically not an Iraqi. And she is not Jordanian. Her six-year-old son, Mohammed, isn't able to attend public schools.

Her family was part of the mass 1948 expulsion of Palestinians. The Kouzah family fled Baghdad in 2006. She says Iraqis went after Palestinians after the U.S. occupation began. Her husband worked as an electrician in Baghdad. But he's been deported from Jordan (he, too, lacked legal residency) and is now living in Bethlehem. He's not working and cannot support the family.

Because of her legal status, she finds herself stuck in Zarqa, Jordan's third largest city, forty minutes away from Amman. It's a bleak, dusty industrial town that for decades has absorbed waves of immigrants--Egyptians, Palestinians, Chechens, and now Iraqis. (Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, hailed from these poverty-stricken streets. "Zarqawi" literally means "someone from Zarqa.")

Jordan and Syria, not the United States, have felt the brunt of the refugee wave that Bush's invasion has caused. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates there are 1.6 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria, and the annual cost of accommodating these Iraqi refugees is $1 billion per country. "Because they are not huddled in camps, these refugees do not get the attention and help they deserve from the U.S. and the international community," states a recent IRC report on Iraqi refugees.

Jordan's government grants legal residency to a very small percentage of the estimated one million Iraqis who have fled there. Wealthy Iraqis can buy residency with a deposit of 100,000 Jordanian dinars ($141,000 U.S.) in the bank. Some middle class professionals are able to get work permits. But many Iraqis are simply overstaying their visas. The Jordanian government has not officially recognized them as refugees. They are considered guests, and life is not easy for them.

Samia says she is willing to work but she can't leave the house due to her daughter's condition. The...

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