Having Laid Waste to Their Country, U.S. Indifferent to Iraqi Refugees

On a rainy March morning, in a drab office complex off one of Metro Detroit's many expressways, I met Mona and Fadi Rabban.

In broken English, they greeted me graciously, keeping their heads slightly bowed. The diminutive Fadi was dressed in black jeans and a beat-up leather jacket. His beautiful middle-aged wife donned a thin, black cardigan and black slacks, which seemed less suitable for the Midwest winter.

Just six months earlier, the Rabbans had been in Jordan awaiting resettlement to the United States. Their arrival in America capped a journey that began in early 2006, when insurgents forced them to flee their Baghdad home.

Fadi, who was an accountant for 35 years, worked for a company that occasionally did business with American firms -- which, in today's Iraqi capital, is a dangerous venture. "When they send you a threat, you have to do [as they say], otherwise they will kill you," he says. "They are serious about it, it's not like a joke."

In a war and occupation that has wrought innumerable, horrific consequences, the Iraqi refugee crisis is among the most disheartening. More than 4 million Iraqis -- including the Rabbans -- have been externally or internally displaced since the American invasion, and while their stories are ignored in much of the West, their forced migration constitutes a humanitarian and political crisis that has yet to be adequately addressed.

Iraqis flee

In the upcoming book War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context, Michael Schwartz, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, writes that Iraq has undergone three waves of displacement since the war began.

First, de-Baathification of the Iraqi government, the disbandment of the Iraqi military and the closing of state-owned industries in 2003 left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis with limited economic prospects. A kidnapping industry boomed shortly thereafter, forcing much of Iraq's moneyed and political elite -- many of whom were targeted for ransom -- to flee.

The second wave came a year later, when American troops began invading insurgent strongholds in cities such as Fallujah and Samarra. Neighborhoods turned into battlegrounds, further disrupting the lives of residents uninvolved in the conflict.

Finally, beginning in 2005, and escalating over the next two years, ethnic cleansing in Baghdad and elsewhere displaced what Schwartz calls "a tsunami" of citizens -- young and old, rich and poor. The infamous February 2006 bombing of Samarra's Golden Dome, an honored Shiite shrine, accelerated the exodus. In all, the number of refugees is staggering, far outstripping the 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds, who were internally displaced during former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's brutal regime.

While people of all ethnic sects have been affected, Chaldean Catholics -- like the Rabbans -- have borne a disproportionate burden. Though Chaldeans make up only 3 percent of Iraq's population, conservative estimates suggest that 25 percent have fled to Syria or relocated to northern Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites have bombed Chaldean-owned businesses and Christian churches in Baghdad, Kirkuk and Mosul. And in one of the war's most high-profile kidnappings, Chaldean archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was abducted on Feb. 29 and his body found two weeks later, half buried in a shallow grave in Mosul.

"Communities that are not protected by larger groups that have militias, like Christian communities, have been especially hit hard," says Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, whose work examines U.S. national security policy in the Middle East.

The Karanas are another such family. (Editor's Note: The names of both families have been changed at their request. No other facts have been altered.) Although reticent during our interview, Samir and his wife Ikhlas stressed, "the situation over there was not safe."