Global Policy Forum

Authorities say the more than 100,000 people who fled sectarian strife
are straining resources. US officials dispute the extent of the problem.

By Borzou Daragahi

The Hotel Karbala has kept pace with Iraq's changing times. In its halcyon days, it housed Shiite Muslim tourists visiting the shrines of this southern Iraqi city. It later became a base for Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and played host to foreign troops after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. But in a sign of the current troubles, the ramshackle two-story concrete building and its weed-strewn lot have become housing for more than 70 Shiite Muslim families who fled violence elsewhere in the country. "We were driven from our houses when we were attacked by terrorists," said Ali Jaffar Hussein, 35, a formerly prosperous Shiite merchant who moved his family here from the religiously mixed city of Tall Afar, about 270 miles to the northwest, fearing attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents. "Now, we don't know our destiny," he said. "The government is not capable of protecting us."

Iraqi officials say more than 100,000 people, both Shiites and Sunnis, have been displaced nationwide by sectarian violence, taxing government resources and heightening political, religious and ethnic tensions. U.S. officials, however, dispute those numbers. Relief workers have sounded the alarm as they struggle to gauge a crisis that appears to have accelerated in recent weeks. The Iraqi Red Crescent Society, in a report issued in May, said 11,391 families had fled their homes since the Feb. 22 bombing of a major Shiite shrine in Samarra, which unleashed a wave of violence between the country's Shiites and Sunni Arabs.

The Iraqi arm of the International Organization for Migration, an internationally funded agency that coordinates relief efforts for displaced people worldwide, estimates that at least 68,000 Iraqis have been forcibly uprooted since the shrine bombing. "The sharp increase in displacement over the past one and a half months is startling," Dana Graber, the Iraq displacement chief of the migration agency, said in a report released in May. "The displaced are moving in with families and friends, but when they are unable to do this they must occupy abandoned buildings or are forced to move into temporary tent camps."

The recently established Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration says that at least 17,129 families fled their homes from Feb. 15 through May 29 due to fear of violence. More than 3,700 families moved to Baghdad from such strife-torn cities as Fallouja, according to the ministry. Other families have fled Baghdad for areas to the northeast and south of the capital, including the provinces of Diyala and Najaf. U.S. officials say accounts of widespread displacement are exaggerated. "We see reports of tens of thousands of families displaced here in Iraq, and we chase down each and every one of those reports," Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, spokesman for U.S.-led forces in Iraq, told reporters at a recent briefing. "We have seen some displacement, pockets of families moving, but not in large numbers."

Regardless of who is correct in Iraq's political climate of blame and victimization, displacements have become an explosive political issue, the subject of news conferences and street protests as well as fiery Friday sermons that condemn the government for failing to enforce law and order. "When these families were forced to leave their homes, they did not find open doors," Sheik Abdul Karim Ghizzi, a Shiite preacher in Basra loyal to radical cleric Muqtada Sadr, told worshipers in April. "Only when they came to Sadr's office did they find hearts opened to them."

The need to accommodate newcomers has further taxed overburdened local governments. For example, the Ministry of Displacement says more than 2,100 families have moved to Karbala province from Fallouja and Samarra since Feb. 15. The southern province must provide the displaced people with housing, healthcare and education as well as deal with the bureaucratic hurdles of transferring their food-ration cards. There are other challenges. Most of the children from Tall Afar at the Hotel Karbala, for example, speak Turkmen rather than Arabic, and need to be tutored to catch up with their peers in school. "Of course this costs us a lot of money," Gov. Akeel Mahmoud Qazali said. "We are in need of a team to follow up their social situation. And we had a shortage of financial resources and public services in the first place."

Military operations have temporarily uprooted many Iraqis over the last three years. But the new displacement fueled by sectarian divisions has deeper ramifications. Now people fleeing violence are forced to give up their livelihoods and homes and become wards of the state or charities. Noomi Hafidh moved his Shiite family of nine from a west Baghdad neighborhood to the southeastern city of Kut, where he found himself one recent day standing in front of the office of a religious foundation, begging for an extra tent. The farmer, subsisting on handouts and the government's monthly ration of rice, wheat, cooking oil, tea and sugar, said he was still traumatized by how his Sunni neighbors had turned on him, and had no plans to move back. "Those people, with whom we have had good relations for years, changed completely toward us, as if they did not know us," he said. In such cases, handouts of emergency items do not suffice.

The Ministry of Displacement and Migration has proposed a series of command-and-control centers to track and aid the displaced. But aid workers say new camps and clusters of people in old buildings are cropping up faster than they can keep track, occasionally in desolate desert outposts such as Saqlawiya, 45 miles west of Baghdad in Al Anbar province. The patriarchs of the Sunni Arab families who arrived at the tent city of several hundred over the last three months said they faced a stark choice: stay put in their Shiite-dominated Baghdad neighborhoods and risk dying at the hands of Shiite militias, or quickly gather a few of their belongings and abandon their homes for the barren wasteland. "We left our homes and belongings behind for one reason," said Abdullah Ani, a 55-year-old former civil servant who lived in the mostly Shiite northern Baghdad neighborhood of Shula, which has been beset by abductions of Sunni Arab men. "We were threatened with death by groups who come in the middle of the night without any fear."

Times staff writer Raheem Salman in Kut and special correspondents in Basra and Saqlawiya contributed to this report.