The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Syria have created their own enclaves, from Little Fallujah to Little Mosul, where many have set up businesses. They pay in US dollars, dance to the tune of their own music and share one desire: to return to an Iraq free of occupying forces. Madam Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have learned a lot if she had taken a stroll in Little Fallujah.
By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times
""Today's "zero point" returns Iraq to its own history, a history written with the ashes of incendiary fires, with its sons fleeing in all directions on the one hand, and its exiles returning to their own homes on the other. I truly do not know if distance today can be defined through the experiences of refugees, or the masses of displaced people, or the exiles returning to burning cities to live out a sense of loss. Distances begin to take on the forms of lines which have been drawn on ashen roads, resembling the traces of people who have lost their way and have never arrived." - Mohamed Mazloom, Baghdad poet, born 1963, exiled in Syria......
This proliferation of Little Iraqs accounts for the biggest exodus in the Middle East since the Palestinians were forced to abandon their own lands in 1948 as the State of Israel was being created. In every single month in Iraq at least 40,000 people are displaced. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there may be as many as 50,000 a month. Were that rate to continue, before 2020, all the population of Iraq would have been "liberated" from its own country.....
Whichever Iraq one picks in Damascus, the mantra is recited in unison. Any glimmer of hope for the future hinges on the Americans leaving - and the establishment, by Iraqis, with no foreign interference, of a non-sectarian government......
Ammar is emphatic: "There is no Sunni against Shi'ite. The Americans provoked it. Since the beginning they started talking about separate areas. In Baghdad most marriages are mixed." That's exactly his case. He is Shi'ite, his wife is Sunni. He says that "in all Arab countries we feel comfortable", but anyway he has entered a demand for a long-term visa to Australia. "We don't want to put pressure on the kindness of the Syrian people.".....
It's easy to forget that Hafez Assad's Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no diplomatic relations whatsoever from 1980 to 1997. Now every Iraqi showing up at the Syrian border automatically gets a one-month visa; they then apply for a three-month resident visa. Visa runs are common. Unlike in "liberated" Iraq, in Syria there's virtually no unemployment for Iraqis. Overqualified, young, educated Iraqis at least survive with dignity as Internet-cafe managers or restaurant waiters. Iraqis are admitted to Syrian schools and universities with no special prerequisites. The Syrian state pays half of their medical bills. No wonder there is also a boom in mixed Syrian-Iraqi marriages......
Syria recognizes - formally - that Iraqis are refugees who need to be protected. The administrations of George W Bush and Tony Blair, on the other hand, could never admit to the world they are the source of all this - "the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world" as defined by Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International.
Pelosi would have learned much more about the effects of the war on Iraq - and what Syria is actually doing about it - if she had traded the historic wonders of the Old City for a stroll in all-too-real Little Fallujah."
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