Iraqi Refugees in Syria

QQ has a good (and very long) story this month Out of Iraq by Chris Heath. "Chased from their country by the ever growing chaos of war, more than a million Iraqi refugees have fled to Syria, where they live in limbo, waiting for a rescue that will likely never come. They cannot work legally, their money is dwindling, and no other country will take them. But almost all of them agree on one thing: They will never come home."

He interviews a lot of different people and one of the things that came through is that they are all afraid, and when people are afraid they don't always tell the truth. He heard one bus coming over the border had it's windshield blown out by American bullets. He interviewed the driver, "he says everyone is okay, but he seems freaked-out. He insists no bullets were involved. It was simply the wind that broke his windshield. The wind. But his face, and the concern of those milling around, suggests a very different story. 'He’s afraid if he tells you about it,' another driver explains, 'he will get his neck cut when he goes back to Iraq.'" There are similar stories about life under Saddam. It will will likely be impossible to ever find out what really happened in so many situations, but one thing is clear, millions of people are in horrible circumstances.

The article ends as follows. I'm sure it doesn't have nearly the impact if you haven't read the article, so read it all first and make it to the end.

"If the Iraqis I met were united in one thought, it was this: that we—that is, you and I—did this to them. And that now we should do something about it. And that, surely, with all our wealth and power and compassion and decency, we would want to and be able to. They want help, not sympathy, and feel so justified in asking for it that they don’t feel obliged to soften their experiences and opinions while doing so. If they are not too worried about any offense they may cause by what they say or describe, that may be because they consider themselves already the subject of an offense they could never hope to equal. It baffles them that nothing much is happening, and many of them assume that it is just a matter of time. Myself, I’m not sure what our moral responsibilities should be or how we should act on them. But I know this: Each day that these refugees awake into the deadened agony of limbo and exile, they think that we are thinking about their predicament. For the most part we’re not, and I’m sure that we should be."