Going Home Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

The Washington Post misses the boat today in writing about Iraqi refugees

The drop in violence caused by the U.S. troop increase in Iraq has prompted refugees to begin returning to their homes, American and Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

Tahsin al-Sheikhly, an Iraqi government spokesman, said 46,030 displaced Iraqis had returned last month from outside the country to their homes in the capital. He declined to comment on how the government determined those statistics.

What the Post neglects to mention and the AP reported yesterday is that after having a relatively open border policy Syria and Jordan have completely clamped down in the last few months. 

Last month's numbers coincide with Syria and Jordan tightening their borders to Iraqis fleeing their homeland.

Syria is home to at least 1.2 million Iraqi refugees, and Jordan has about 750,000. Many of those Iraqis are living in limbo, unable to work and running out of any money they were able to bring out of Iraq.

Syria began demanding visas for Iraqis last month and Jordan has increasingly turned back Iraqis.

Those who fled to the two neighboring countries before the new restrictions were put in place are now forced to leave when residency permits expire, unless they have been officially recognized by the United Nations as refugees — a process that can take months.

Another thing that the Post omits is that IDP numbers are rising dramatically even as refugee numbers have stabilized.  In other words the same number of people are being displaced.  It’s just that because the borders have closed more of them are getting stuck inside Iraq.  This again would tend to reinforce the argument that the new numbers have a lot more to do with harsher border policies than anything else.  Saying that refugees are returning is one thing.  Saying that Sunnis who were ethnically cleansed out of mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad are now returning to those neighbors seems incredibly dubious.

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