Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC
Last week, Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group became the latest in a series of refugee advocates to tell me that the United States owed a special obligation to the Iraqis that have fled the country since the 2003 invasion.
Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC
While the Iraqi refugee populations in Syria, Jordan and other neighbors appear to have stabilized, one analyst in the region says conditions in Iraq suggest the possibility of another exodus.
This video was removed due to security concern.
THE PROMISE OF FREEDOM is a documentary feature that traces the intersecting stories of U.S.-affiliated Iraqi refugees and the Americans attempting to aid them. The film exposes the long-term human consequences of war and raises questions about the moral responsibility we have to those Iraqis who lost everything because they believed in America most.
Aired the week of Friday, August 29th, 2008.
Imran Riza, the representative in Amman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, discusses in an interview with Matthew Brown the challenges facing Iraqis in Jordan, and the ways in which they differ from more traditional refugees.
Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Damascus, Syria
The relationship between Iraqi refugees and their hosts in Syria and Jordan is complicated.
On the one hand, I have heard much talk of Arab brotherhood among both officials and ordinary people in the two countries. On the other, Iraqis in both countries are blamed for rising prices and housing costs.
Salaam Marougi says he understands the negative reactions he occasionally encounters.
Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Damascus, Syria
As a Sunni Muslim married to a Shia, Hamid Al Dulayme was threatened by both sides in Baghdad. When militia members broke into his house in 2005, he fled Iraq.
In Syria, he says, he has left sectarian conflict behind. "The best thing here is there is no problem between different groups," Dulayme told me this morning in Saida Zeinab, a suburb of Damascus now dominated by refugees.
Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Amman, Jordan
Back home in Baghdad, Najim Abid Hajwal owned a sheepskin factory. He had a house in the fashionable Al Mansour neighborhood and a farm where he raised chickens and grew oranges and lemons.
I met Hajwal this morning at a clinic run by the Catholic charity Caritas in East Amman. He was clutching an envelope containing X-rays taken of his 16-year-old son, who had fallen off a roof while attempting to adjust a satellite dish.
The three hotels in this suburb of Basra, the largest city in southern Iraq, are always full. "We don't have tourism here," says Jabbar Mubarak, the clerk at the Bourj al-Babil, Zubair's largest hotel. "Everyone who comes to our hotel comes to visit their sons."
The "sons" are in Camp Bucca. A half-hour's drive from Zubair toward the Kuwaiti border, Bucca is the U.S. military's largest detention center in Iraq. It currently holds about 18,000 Iraqis, the majority of those in U.S. custody. An additional 3,000 are at Camp Cropper at Baghdad Airport.
Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Amman, Jordan
The flood of Iraqis into Jordan is crowding classrooms, straining the health care system and draining the limited water supply here. It is blamed for driving up housing costs and -- although it is illegal for most Iraqis to work here -- creating more competition for jobs.
The influx is seen generally as another burden on a developing nation in which the people are struggling, as in other places, with the rising costs of fuel, food and other necessities.
Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
In a sense, I've been preparing for this trip since the spring of 2000. That's when I first traveled to Iraq, to write about life for Iraqis then caught between sanctions and Saddam.
I journeyed from Baghdad to Basra, visiting hospitals, schools and the homes of ordinary Iraqis. By then, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator for Iraq was estimating that the widest-ranging embargo in history, then more than nine years old, had been responsible for the deaths of one million Iraqis, most of them children.
Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC
In the two and a half years since the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samara inspired whole new levels of sectarian violence across Iraq, hundreds of thousands have fled their homeland. More than 2 million now have settled in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and other countries, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. That's nearly one in 10 Iraqis.
Here's a Pulitzer-sponsored piece from Sunday's Washington Times.
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