Middle East

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.

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
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.

"You're much more likely to die in a traffic accident than get caught up in a terrorist attack," said a friend, who works here as a private security consultant.

If you've ever found your taxi driver hurtling the wrong way down a dual carriageway or seen little boys behind the wheel of their dad's car struggling to see over the dashboard, you'll know you're on the road in Yemen.

A recent article in the Yemen Times reported 43 deaths and 396 injuries in traffic accidents in a single week.

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.

Yemen's Ministry of Information is tucked away in the streets behind Liberation Square. The Arabic word for information is elam. It looks simple enough, but there's an 'ayn' letter squeezed in there and I just can't get the pronunciation right – which leads to some frustrating and surreal moments with taxi drivers. It seems I've been asking to go to the Ministry of Dreams (ahlam) instead.

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.

A while ago, when I first came to Yemen, there was a TV adv run by a cell phone manufacturer on the Arab satellite channels. It started with a close-up shot of an Arab woman's face. She seemed to be writhing with pleasure, but the camera pulled back to show her wriggling into a pair of skin-tight jeans. The new slim-line handset was thin enough to fit into the tightest pocket – that was the message.

A hairdryer whirrs. Teenage girls reach for sequins, glitter and hairpins. It's the weekend in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, and seven sisters are dressing for a wedding.

The eldest, Ashwaq, 21, a university graduate, wants to be a journalist.

Asked what she thinks about Yemen's new self-appointed morality authority, she looks up from styling her sister's hair.

"The first thing they'll do is stop women from working. Then they'll force us to wear the veil."

Yemen is a conservative Islamic society, where parliament boasts only one woman out of 301 MPs.