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Iraqi Refugees

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Iraqi and Jordanian students stand on the sidelines of a pickup soccer game in Amman. By some estimates, four out of five Iraqi refugee children are out of school. "That’s potentially disastrous to the country, to lose generations like that," says Imran Riza, the top U.N. refugee official in Amman.

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Wahd Deen Fadel, 52, says he lost his home when Kurdish authorities in Kirkuk expelled the Arabs. "I lived in a big house," he says at a gathering for Iraqi refugees in Amman, Jordan. "Now I live in a chicken house."

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Nabil Hassom prepares a serving of kuba — an Iraqi dish of fried lamb dumplings in tomato broth — at his al-Baracka restaurant in the Syrian town of Saida Zainab. The 60-year-old Iraqi, who came to Syria in 2004, laments the collapse of security and the rise of sectarian violence in his homeland since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

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Thirteen-year-old Ussam al-Sharraf is delighted to be spending his days helping his father at the al-Baracka restaurant in Saida Zainab, Syria, but Nabil Hassom worries that Ussam and his other children will be unable to succeed in life without schooling.

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Adnan al-Sharafy, an official with the Iraqi Embassy in Syria, has organized bus rides for Iraqi refugees who wish to return to Baghdad. The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has largely resisted international calls to support its citizens abroad. "The responsibility of the Iraqi government is to facilitate the process of returning to Iraq, not to make it easier for the Iraqis to stay," al-Sharafy says.

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A refugee worker interviews an Iraqi family at a U.N. registration center in Douma, Syria.

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A refugee worker interviews an Iraqi family at a U.N. registration center in Douma, Syria.

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Rusul Muhamad, Nadia Abbas and Laila Ibrahim, who came to Jordan after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, listen to announcements at a gathering for Iraqi refugees in Amman.