Money gone, Iraqi refugees forced to go home

Few rights, opportunities
Even those who can scrape out a living in Syria find life difficult. Pride takes a battering when Iraqis find themselves in countries where they have few rights and opportunities.

Bassam Meshrif, who shares a Damascus apartment with four friends, said he has decided to go home to Iraq, too, because he is “so fed up with all the humiliation” of life as a foreigner.

Before fleeing Iraq, the 28-year-old software engineer worked for the Ministry of Finance. Now he is the foreman of a cleaning crew in Damascus.

“I know I’m putting my life in danger if I go back. But I’ve had enough and my savings are gone,” Meshrif said. “It’s hard to go, but it is harder to stay. With all these obligations, everything just became too much to bear.”

Others fear they can’t hold out much longer.

“Although we know that we cannot settle here, we can’t go back now, it’s too dangerous,” said Shatha Mohammed, a widow and mother of three who lives in Damascus off money sent by her mother in Sweden.

“I just pray that I will not see that day coming soon, because there (in Iraq) I have no support and no protector,” she said.

For many Iraqis, including Iman Faleh, her widowed daughter, son and granddaughter, that day has come.

“We have to go back, although we don’t want to. We have no choice,” said Faleh’s daughter, Zainab, 25, whose husband was killed this year in a car bombing in Baghdad.

Expensive trip home
Holding her 3-year-old daughter in her arms, Zainab sobbed and cast her eyes skyward as the family prepared to go back to Iraq.

“May God protect us and all other battered Iraqis from any evil,” she said.

As Zainab wept, her mother was negotiating with a taxi driver to take the family to Baghdad — an arduous 600-mile journey across the desert. The driver wanted $600. Eventually, Iman promised to give the driver the cash when they reached Baghdad.

“It’s so very expensive, like we’re going back to heaven. But we still have to pay $600 to go back to hell,” she said.

The driver, 37-year-old Udai al-Ani, said that during the summer, he made good money driving Iraqis to Syria. Now, he finds more fares headed in the opposite direction.

“Last week I traveled back twice to Iraq with my car full of passengers. Most of them are returning because they were broke,” said al-Ani. As he spoke, the Faleh family got in his taxi and the group headed back to Iraq.

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