Here is an article (thanks again to Chris) about Iraqi refugees who are Palestinians and now living in Jordan. Apparently some of those are being helped privately and that is a good thing. See yesterday’s post about private funds helping the Iraqi Chaldean refugees.
Samia says she is willing to work [Jordan must allow refugees to work] but she cannot leave the house due to her daughter’s condition. The family is surviving on assistance from a brother and from NGOs such as Al Tamkeen, a local project funded by the International Rescue Committee and implemented by the Near East Foundation. Samia said the United Nations High Commission for Refugees hasn’t done much for her.
Then the article goes on to say that the Palestinians living in Iraq were hated by the Iraqis and fled Iraq when we invaded, however it’s puzzling to note that we arrived in Iraq in 2003 and they didn’t leave until the time the surge began in 2006.
The Kouzah family fled Baghdad in 2006. She said Iraqis went after Palestinians after the U.S. occupation began.
A reader asked why were the Palestinians not welcome to stay in Iraq. The Brookings Institution report I referred to yesterday obliquely mentions this was because the Palestinians were favored by Saddam Hussein.
Another reader, Setare, responds with more interesting information and some links to Human Rights Watch which has apparently taken up the cause of the Iraqi Palestinians. One article answers the question of why the Palestinians are hated in Iraq.
Here are a couple of links to reports by Human Rights Watch that might be of help:
http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2006/04/07/jord…
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/iraqjordan/
An excerpt from the first linked article:
“Following the 2003 Iraq conflict, many Palestinians in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities came under direct attack, in part due to resentment of the fact that Saddam Hussein’s government provided many of them with homes it seized from Iraqi Shia.”
Then to add more evidence to what I said yesterday that we are not getting the whole story about the Iraqi refugees another reader, Kris, says this:
It’s funny, a few months ago I met an Iraqui gentleman in Amman visiting for Operation Smile with the Iraqui doctors. I talked with him about the war and he assured me that it was just a blip in the stream of human history and that people were not suffering, that life was normal. It was really hard to reconcile that point of view with the people that I meet every day.
I’m wondering, can’t we get some definitive study about the Iraqi displaced persons situation, maybe from some independent outfit (not the UN or the NGO’s!) so that policy decisions can be made without being distorted by the politics of the War and by those who have assorted motives for wisking tens of thousands of Iraqis to the US.