When Home Becomes Hell

My Uncle Brahim is trapped inside his Baghdad home—waiting to flee a country that six months ago he swore he'd never leave. With him are his wife, his hugely pregnant daughter and his 1-year-old grandson. I'm not sure how to say "cabin fever" in Arabic, but I'm pretty sure they have it. They've been holed up for months in that house as battles rage in and around their Mansour neighborhood. I can hear the anarchy outside their door when I call—explosions, gunshots and, once, a scream. Still, my 77-year-old diabetic uncle greets me like the world is full of roses: "Habibi hiyati! [Love of my life!] How is my American girl?"

There seem to be a billion obstacles between Brahim's family and escape. They're still waiting on their new Iraqi passports, even though Brahim applied months ago. And who will watch their house of 45 years and all their belongings inside? Then there's the question of where to go. Jordan and Syria are already swamped with Iraqi refugees and have tightened, if not sealed off, their borders. It's clear that Brahim and his family waited too long, and now things are desperate. "I think maybe we will try Bulgaria, Loreen," he says. "My son-in-law knows a person there, and I hear they are excellent for the clinic of diabetes."

Baghdad or Bulgaria? This is what it's come to for thousands of families like ours. Most everyone from my dad's side of the family (whose names I've changed for security reasons) lived in the Iraqi capital up until 2003. But now, if they're not hiding out in their homes, they're struggling to adjust to life somewhere else. Brahim's middle daughter, Mahia, is in Amman with her three young kids. Her sister Lulu is in Germany with her husband and baby. My late Aunt Fatima's son Sami fled to southern Iraq when his Baghdad home was seized by insurgents. He's now looking to move to Egypt or even Sweden. His brilliant geologist sister Silma left her upscale Baghdad home and is now stuffed into a tiny apartment in Amman with her husband, Omar, and three teenagers. Uncle Hassan's daughter Loubna, once a curator for the museum of Baghdad, fled to Syria. So did her brother. But their sister never arrived. She was killed on the road from Baghdad to Damascus. Three more distant relatives were never afforded the chance to flee—or turn 25. They were brutally murdered, their mutilated bodies dumped in the streets of Baghdad.

Those cousins who have made it out of Iraq alive are part of the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world. An estimated 2.3 million Iraqis have fled the country since the 2003 invasion. They represent the largest displacement of people in the region since the Palestinian diaspora nearly a half century ago. About 50,000 people escape Baghdad each month. A staggering 1.7 million are displaced within Iraq, while almost 2 million more have sought refuge in Syria and Jordan, 130,000 in Egypt and 50,000 in Iran. Even Sweden is feeling the effects of this war: last year alone, 9,000 Iraqis applied for asylum there, and 90 percent of those requests were approved.

By contrast, the United States has taken in 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003. "This is not just a regional crisis, it's a global one," says Kristele Younes, a Refugees International advocate monitoring the Iraqi refugee flow. "But for the Bush administration to address the problem they'd have to admit failure in Iraq, and I don't see that happening any time soon." Responding to the criticism, the State Department recently announced plans to refer 7,000 Iraqis to the U.S. Resettlement Program by September. Sami's 19-year-old son, Ausama, heard about the openings and immediately text-messaged me. "There are some spaces for us there? Please send 2 me information soon." How can I tell him that with those odds, getting into America is about as likely as winning the lottery?

The exodus has not only scattered my family, it's hollowed out Iraq's most skilled classes—doctors, engineers, managers and bureaucrats. Baghdad was once home to one of the most educated populaces in the Middle East. (I find it amazing that almost every single one of my cousins, and their kids, speak fluent English.) Many were part of a generation of middle-class professionals who, during the 1970s, transformed Iraq into the Middle East's most diversified economy. In my family alone, there's at least one scientist, an engineer, two teachers and an accountant looking for work in other countries. Omar recently sent me his résumé from Amman (like most Iraqis, he's not allowed to work there legally) in hopes of finding work in the United States. It turns out that he was one of Iraq's top hydraulic engineers, and helped design the water systems that we blew up.