Middle East

Imran Riza, the representative in Amman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, discusses the challenges facing Iraqis in Jordan, and the ways in which they differ from more traditional refugees.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC

The news today that nearly 100 Sudanese refugees in Iraq now are headed to Romania highlights the plight of a particularly vulnerable group: Those who were already refugees in Iraq when the war triggered the current crisis.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees announced on Monday that it had referred its 50,000th Iraqi for resettlement. Buried in the press release is the story of another refugee facing a horrible dilemma.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been detained by the US, one and a half million have had an immediate family-member detained, almost every Iraqi knows someone who has been through the US detention system. Few American institutions affect the lives of ordinary Iraqis more directly and profoundly than the US detention system.

At one point during "the Surge" the US was holding 27,000 Iraqis. Today it holds 17,000.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Baltimore, MD

I was invited to dinner last night by a family that in some ways typifies the Iraqi resettlement experience.

Abu Rawan is a 62-year-old engineer who served as an interpreter and adviser to U.S. commanders and diplomats after the 2003 invasion. His wife is a pediatrician; they have two sons, aged 13 and 14.

Matthew Hay Brown, for the Pulitzer Center
Washington, DC

After admitting record numbers of Iraqi refugees in the final months of fiscal 2008, the United States is off to a slow start in the first months of the fiscal '09.

The country admitted 705 Iraqis as refugees in October and 738 in November, according to numbers released last week by the State Department. That's a steep decline from the more than 2,000 per month who landed here in July, August and September.

Moqtada al Sadr and his militia, the Mehdi Army - or 'JAM' in American military shorthand, have been America's most intractable opponents in Iraq. But after recent attacks launched by the US and Iraqi military against Sadr strongholds, cease-fires were negotiated and the Mehdi Army melted away from the streets. Has the Mehdi Army finally been defeated, and is this the end of the armed Shiite resistance to the occupation?

Begins airing Friday, December 5th, 2008 on public television's Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal

One afternoon in May 2007, a few days after my graduation from journalism school, I was seated with some friends at a booth in Tom's Restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when my cell phone beeped. I had a text message from a classmate. It read, "Don't back out now."

Barack Obama's foreign-policy advisers must be hoping that Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is ready to pull a rabbit out of his mashadda. If Obama is determined to close Guantanamo when he takes office, he'll have to strike a deal with Saleh over repatriation conditions for dozens of Yemeni men who are currently stuck in diplomatic limbo.

The British think-tank Chatham House (also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs) published my paper on Yemen last week. Claire Spencer, head of Chatham House's Middle East programme, chaired a round-table discussion for an invited audience, including representatives from the UK Foreign Office and Arab diplomats.

Go to Chatham House.org to download the paper.

Yemen presents a potent combination of problems for policy-makers confronting the prospect of state failure in this strategically important Red Sea country. It is the poorest state in the Arab world, with high levels of unemployment, rapid population growth and dwindling water resources.