Iraqis Find No More Refuge in Syria

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During the Iraq war, thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria to escape the violence back home. Now many see Syria as the more dangerous place and some are trying to leave. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Becca Heller of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project. Download MP3

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Marco Werman:  Several years ago, Syria was seen as a refuge for Iraqis fleeing their war-torn homeland.  Now many of them see Syria as the dangerous place to be, and some are trying to leave.  Becca Heller is the director of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project.  She’s speaking to us from Beirut.  Becca, you’ve got colleagues who’ve just returned from Syria.  What are they telling you?

Becca Heller:  What we’re hearing from a lot of our clients is that they’re not sure whether to stay or leave at this point.  I think that everyone’s really terrified, and people feel like if it’s dangerous, they’d rather go home and die in their own country.

Werman:  And when you say they want to go home…  So Iraqi refugees want to go back to Iraq, to Baghdad, and the cities they come from?

Heller:  Yeah.  I mean, I think that, that the hardest thing for them is the waiting.  You know, that’s just really terrifying for them, not knowing where the danger will come from.  This is a really protracted situation that they’ve been in for eight years, and in a sense I think, you know, they’d rather just go back to the devil that they know.  And people will literally just say, you know, “If I’m going to die, I want to die at home in Iraq.”

Werman:  Though things have calmed down quite a bit in Iraq, it does speak to just how bad things are in Syria, if they’re ready to leave and go back to Iraq.

Heller:  I mean, I think it varies depending on who you are.  You know, we have a number of clients in Damascus who are religious minorities, and they are not considering returning to Iraq.  But I think the other thing that’s important to note is that, you know, people aren’t returning to their homes that we know, for the most part.  I think a lot of people are going to the north, or the south, or hiding in a remote village with more distant family members, where they feel like they won’t be found by whoever was after them and forced them to leave in the first place.

Werman:  I see.  Remind us how many Iraqis have fled to Syria in the past eight years.

Heller:  There’s about 190,000 who are currently registered with the UNHCR.  No one knows what the exact numbers are, because the guesses from various sides tend to be pretty politicized.  It could be anywhere from a few hundred thousand to up to a million.  My guess would probably be around the 300,000 mark.  But a large number.

Werman:  And what about the intentions of these Iraqi refugees who went to Syria?  Did they intend to stay, or did most eventually want to return to Iraq?

Heller:  I think most of them would like to go to a third country.  UNHCR has done surveys and certainly for us, we had over two hundred cases, and most people don’t want to go back.  Some people feel like if it got safe, they’d go back, but they don’t think it’ll ever be safe enough, and other people feel like, you know, based on what happened to them, you know, after they were kidnapped or tortured or raped, that it’s just not a place that they can return to.  And I think people went to Syria thinking of it as a way-point from which they could hopefully get resettled to another country.  Resettlement is really, for most people it’s a pipe dream.  And the tragedy is that almost all the Iraqi refugees I’ve talked to believe that they’re on some kind of waiting list; that if they wait there long enough, if they can kind of hold on, eventually they’ll be resettled, when in fact there is no wait list.  And they’re just sort of in this limbo that a lot of people don’t even recognize.

Werman:  Becca Heller, director of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, speaking with us from Beirut, Lebanon.  Thank you very much, Becca.

Heller:  Thank you.

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