Syria and Jordan: The Iraqi Exodus

JARAMANA, Syria -- Hasem Abed is thinking about going back to Iraq.

The small-time auto trader, 32, left Diyala earlier this year after members of a Shia militia destroyed his house.

He says this town outside Damascus has been more secure, but he has run out of money and has been unable to find work. He is thinking of trying his luck in Baghdad.

Hassam Abdul Rahman might join him. Life in Iraq, the 42-year-old mechanical engineer says, "is very bad." But he, too, has exhausted his savings in Syria.

It's not that Muhammad Shumri imagined building a new life in Baltimore would be easy. But he didn't expect it to be so hard.

The 48-year-old physician was a high-ranking official in the Iraqi Ministry of Health when a photograph that placed him at a meeting with U.S. officials was stolen from his computer. Soon he was receiving anonymous threats warning him to stop working with the Americans.

He moved his wife and five children out of Iraq, traveled alone to the United States and requested asylum. He planned to get a job, find a place to live and send for his family.

WASHINGTON -- After a stranger snapped her photograph as she entered the Green Zone, Tina Raad's family begged her to get out of Iraq.

At first, she resisted. The Iraqi woman had sought work with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Baghdad because she wanted to join in the reconstruction of her country.

But in the eyes of Iraqi insurgents, such collaboration made her a traitor. Changing her dress, varying the route she took to work and altering her hours had not stopped their threats. When her mother and three siblings fled Iraq, she relented.

DAMASCUS, Syria -- Adnan al-Sharafy sees a few obstacles holding up the return of Iraqi refugees to their home country: the U.S. military, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the news media.

Sharify, an official at the Iraqi Embassy here in Syria, helped to organize government-sponsored bus trips at the end of last year that he says carried 420 Iraqi families back to Baghdad. (The United Nations estimates the Iraqi population here at 1.2 million.)

More free rides home are planned, Sharify says. But finding takers is likely to remain a challenge.