Your tax dollars:
I guess Will can call me an evil and stingy person, but we send our men and women to fight and die for Iraq’s freedom, and their people run and hide in surrounding countries and then we pay for that too. Except for the truly persecuted Christians, the rest should just go home and tell the insurgents to get out. As a matter of fact, I wonder how many would flee if it weren’t for the United Nations holding out to them the alluring possibility of life in the West through resettlement.
GENEVA, January 8 (UNHCR) – The UN refugee agency on Tuesday launched an appeal for US$261 million to fund its operations this year on behalf of hundreds of thousands of those uprooted by the conflict in Iraq.
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Chief UNHCR spokesman Ron Redmond told journalists in Geneva that the Iraq Situation Supplementary Appeal covered programmes for many of the 2.2 million Iraqis displaced within Iraq, as well as the 2 million who have fled to other countries in the region, including Syria, Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and several of the Gulf States. The agency also cares for some 41,000 non-Iraqi refugees in Iraq, including Palestinians, Iranians, Turks and others.
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Redmond also noted that UNHCR, which is funded primarily through voluntary contributions from governments, now has nearly 350 staff directly engaged in operations for Iraq and the surrounding region.
350 UN employees! I wonder how much gravy is sloshing around in those salaries? And then there are the Palestinians:
The appeal also makes special mention of the dire situation facing some 13,000 Palestinian refugees in Iraq, many of whom have been targeted by armed groups and who have been unable to find sanctuary in other countries. “UNHCR will continue to seek solutions for the Palestinians, including the possibility of resettlement for the most vulnerable,” Redmond stressed.
Back in October I posted on a Brookings Institution Study that said the Palestinians were in Iraq because they were favored by Saddam Hussein. Could their association with Saddam be the reason they are targeted? If you go back to that October report you will see there is a lot more to the story than poor suffering Iraqis running from violence. Some of those Iraqis in Syria have been there for years, long before our arrival in Iraq, others are men who got out of Iraq when the surge began.