Omar sits with his wife and three small children on their only items of furniture, a few cushions and a cheap carpet which covers the floor of a bare concrete room. They escaped from Baghdad last month, joining the quarter of a million Iraqis who have fled from their homes since sectarian violence exploded this year.
He is a Sunni who used to live in the capital city’s mainly Shia district of Husseiniya but every Iraqi community — Shia, Sunni, Christian and Kurd — has been hit by the rage and revenge that are destroying mixed urban neighbourhoods and turning the country into a patchwork of fear-ridden mono-ethnic enclaves.
Most flee to areas of their own sect or ethnic group, but Omar — who was afraid to give his real name — came to Kurdistan because it is Iraq’s safest region, even though he has no friends or relatives here. ”I speak no Kurdish but some people here who served in the Iraqi army speak Arabic. Everyone’s very hospitable.”
”About a thousand Sunni families lived in Husseiniya, but almost all have left by now,” he says. A car mechanic, he has not yet found work in Kurdistan. He pays $150 a month out of the family’s savings for their room and toilet .
In another part of the bleak village of Sewys, on the windy plain east of Kurdistan’s capital Irbil, a Kurdish estate agent explains why he left Mosul, Iraq’s third largest city. An armed Arab came into the office where he worked as an estate agent in a mixed Arab-Kurdish area. ”He told me they were part of the resistance to the Americans and needed my house for an operation. When I refused, the gunman rang his friend who was in a car outside and said ‘Let’s go to his house anyway’.” Samir (who declines to give his last name) closed his office and drove straight to Irbil.
On the phone his wife told him three cars had appeared at the house and the men inside were watching it. Fortunately, they did not enter and his wife left for Irbil two days later with their children.
Samir produces an A4 piece of paper he says was sent to a relative last month. It begins with a few verses of the Qur’an and the phrase in Arabic: ”The people mentioned below must be killed because they are drug dealers, spies, or traitors working against Iraq.” Twelve names and addresses follow. Two are identified as ”peshmerga” (the Kurdish militia), one as a ”member of the national guard”, and the fourth as an ”unpatriotic Kurd”.
There is no way of telling whether the death list, which is signed starkly ”Intelligence Committee”, is authentic but Samir’s family took no chances. ”My brother’s name is on the list. He left immediately for Syria,” says Samir’s wife.
Sewys’s previous population of 3 000 has increased by half in the last few months. Escapees choose it because house rents are lower than in Irbil.
A similar increase is affecting Ein Kawa, Irbil’s mainly Christian enclave, which has seen an influx of 7 000 families from Baghdad and Mosul in the last few months. Schools have had to hire Arabic-speaking teachers and add an afternoon shift in Arabic. The church gives $150 a month to Christians who need it.
A foreign-funded NGO, the Public Aid Organisation, sends social workers out to give legal advice and assess what help the displaced need. Iraq still has a system of subsidised food rations, dating from the Saddam Hussein era, but families who leave their home areas have difficulty re-registering for it elsewhere.
Karim Sinjari, Kurdistan’s interior minister, says the region has received close to 50 000 people since the crisis began. ”The Christians have relatives here. Kurds are similar. It’s the Arabs who have difficulties,” he says.
Dreading an even bigger influx if central and southern Iraq collapse into all-out civil war, he has approached the UN’s refugee agency for help. ”We won’t close our borders but if the numbers soar, what can we do? The UN says we shouldn’t resort to refugee camps, but we say where can we put them?”
The Kurdish government offers no financial help to the displaced. But it gives jobs to the doctors, professors, and engineers among them. ”We encourage them to stay here rather than go to Syria or Jordan,” Sinjari says.
The International Organisation of Migration reported this month on a survey of the displaced in six of Iraq’s 18 governorates. In Kirkuk, 55% had no access to healthcare and 70% of children had not been vaccinated.
IOM started emergency aid to the displaced this summer with US funding. But with no sign of the number of displaced falling, it is asking for a further $20-million to continue providing assistance. – Guardian Unlimited Â