Jordan

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

Najim Abid Hajwal has been having a difficult time renewing his passport.

He submitted his paperwork at the Iraqi Embassy here, but was told days later that he was wanted back home in Iraq. It turned out the Interior Ministry was after someone with a similar name. He submitted new paperwork to prove his identity, but was issued a passport with a wrong name.

It's enough to make an Iraqi nostalgic for the good old days.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Amman, Jordan

Since arriving here earlier this week, I've heard several estimates of the number of Iraqis living in Jordan.

At the Iraqi Embassy today, I was told the population is no larger than 200,000. The number used by the Jordanian government, which is based on a survey completed last year by the FAFO Institute for Applied International Studies of Norway, is between 450,000 and 500,000.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Amman, Jordan

Officially, the Iraqi government is encouraging its citizens abroad to return to the country. When they might make that trip is another question.

"We're still in the organization process," Aleaddin H. Ali, the first secretary at the Iraqi Embassy here in Jordan, told me this afternoon. "We're getting statistics and preparations are being made."

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.

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
Amman, Jordan

Marwan Abdullah misses Iraq. But he has no plans to go back.

"I would be killed for sure," the 18-year-old told me yesterday.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Amman, Jordan

These refugees don't live in camps. And that's making it more difficult for aid workers to address their growing needs.

The great majority of Iraqis who have come to Jordan have settled here in the capital. Most have disappeared into the cosmopolitan population of this Middle Eastern hub; many are intentionally keeping their profiles low, for fear of being caught, detained, and sent back to Iraq.

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.