<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nWar\u2019s damage spreads outward, a nightmarish perpetual-motion machine in which cause and effect ricochet back and forth, swapping roles, mutating, creating tragedies never imagined when the first bomb was dropped or the first bullet was fired.\n\nRefugees are often such a tragedy. Most of us are aware that, amidst the ghastly quagmire of Iraq, millions have abandoned their homes\u2014but it has been the act, and fact, of leaving that has tended to get the attention, the refugees merely another by-product and statistic of conflict. The thoughtless implication is that once Iraqis slip over a border and out of the picture, their problems are somehow solved. That is rarely the case. If the act of becoming a refugee is the act of leaving the hell of your old life, it is also often a step into a different kind of hell. A step not onto the solid ground of a new life but into the midair of no life at all.\n\nWhen people think of refugees, often they think of faceless masses living in tents, hemmed in by high fences. Though an estimated 1.4 million Iraqis have so far fled to Syria, there are, for now, no refugee camps of that kind here. This is doubtless a blessing; the great majority of Iraqis who come to Syria either bring with them some money or gold or, thanks to Middle Eastern culture\u2019s extended family and kinship webs, know someone on whom they hope to rely. But it can also serve to hide the severity of this refugee crisis. Iraqis are not allowed to work in Syria\u2014and as there is little available work anyway, few do\u2014so they are quickly running through whatever nest eggs they have. Mostly hidden away in three run-down Damascus suburbs, their increasing deprivation and desperation largely goes unnoticed.\n\nThe neighborhood in which Iraqis are most visible is called Sayyida Zeinab. There is one central thoroughfare where, for a few hundred yards, the concentration of Iraqi shops and food stalls is so great that the street is now known by Syrians as \u201CIraqi Street.\u201C Here, on any given evening, virtually every single man is Iraqi. (There are almost no women out. The women are at home.) At one end, Iraqi Street runs into a large, refuse-strewn square, in its center a fenced concrete court where a seemingly never-ending game of soccer is in progress. The dim light by which they play at night spills from the businesses around the square\u2019s perimeter, most of them travel agencies. This square is not just a focal point of Iraqi life in Syria; it is where it usually starts, quite literally. Here is where most of the buses that leave Iraq each day spill out their passengers into a new country, these dusty and dirty streets the first Syrian ground that they will feel beneath their feet.\n\nThe buses, which have left Baghdad in the morning, start arriving after midnight. On my first evening in Sayyida Zeinab this June, I sit outside on the corner of the square at a kind of caf\u00E9 (just a few old plastic chairs on the street), waiting, trying to get my bearings and to make sure that each time I order another small glass of tea it isn\u2019t served the way the Iraqis prefer it, supersaturated with sugar. Another tea drinker, a man called Hassan, strikes up a conversation. He has seen my notebook and heard me speak English, and wants to know whether I can help him with his UNHCR papers. (UNHCR, the United Nations organization set up to help refugees, is, as I will see, doing what it can here.) He is 57 and used to live in the southern city of Basra, where he taught and wrote novels and poetry. \u201CBefore the war,\u201C he says, \u201Cwe were living like kings.\u201C But, he laments, since the invasion, gangsters and mercenaries have taken over, and the intellectuals and good people have been forced out. He left Iraq after receiving a death threat\u2014targeted, he thinks, because he was branded an atheist for refusing to lead his students in prayer. He doesn\u2019t even care to know who threatened him. \u201CBecause there\u2019s no central government in Iraq,\u201C he says, \u201Cthere\u2019s 140 parties, and each one of them has its own militia that\u2019s doing sectarian killing.\u201C His threat came eight months ago; he moved his family somewhere else and left for Syria the next day. He hasn\u2019t seen his family since. He is yet to meet his new grandson, though he did get to choose his name: Amen. Even that choice is a reflection of these tragic times: \u201CIt\u2019s a neutral name,\u201C he explains. \u201CIt\u2019s a name that\u2019s not going to be targeted by any of the sectarian militias.\u201C\n\nHere in Damascus, alone, he smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and does menial work when he can get it. \u201CGreat,\u201C he says drily. \u201CI\u2019m a novelist who\u2019s working as a guard. I feel like I\u2019ve fallen from the sky into the earth\u2019s deepest point.\u201C\n\n\n\nThere is a very simple reason why the Iraqi people are choosing Syria as their place of refuge. For most Iraqis\u2014those not rich or well connected enough to make the barriers between nations melt away as the rich and well connected always can\u2014Syria is the only country that will accept them. (For a while, Jordan shared this open-border policy, but since terrorists killed sixty people in a series of hotel bombings in November 2005, no longer.)\n\nThis is one of the bitterest ironies of life as a citizen of the freshly liberated Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein\u2019s dictatorship, only a privileged few were allowed to travel abroad. Now, as supposedly free citizens of a nascent democracy, everyone is allowed to travel but they are welcome almost nowhere.\n\n\n\nTonight, the first bus arrives in the square at around 1:15 a.m. As it appears, the drivers of a handful of white Hyundai pickups\u2014known by the Syrians as \u201Cbus chasers\u201C\u2014rev into action, manically following the bus\u2019s rear, vying for position to be closest when the bus stops. They\u2019re competing for work transporting passengers to wherever they\u2019re going: homes already arranged by friends or families or, if no arrangements have been made, maybe one of the temporary pay-by-the-night apartments being hawked by lurking entrepreneurs. Those coming off the bus betray neither jubilation nor despair; they just look tired. I briefly speak to an exhausted doctor and he explains that he is just visiting. \u201CFor a month, at first,\u201C he says. Maybe that\u2019s the plan he\u2019ll stick to, but I will also come to realize that there\u2019s a certain kind of Iraqi refugee who prefers not to admit the decision he has made right away, neither to others nor himself.\n\nThe Iraqi part of Sayyida Zeinab is a late-night society. When you have nothing to get up for, there\u2019s no hurry to bed, and it is not until about three in the morning that the activity around the square begins to ease down. Around 3:30 a.m., as the last of the soccer kids leave the center of the square, I watch one of the bus drivers clean out his bus. He simply pushes the trash down the bus\u2019s steps onto the road. Small flocks of sheep graze these neighborhood streets, picking through the garbage, so I suppose they\u2019ll be thrilled. A few minutes later, the first call to morning prayers begins at the Iranian mosque a few hundred yards away, the most venerated Shia shrine in Syria and the building that gives this district its name. The rhythmic drone spreads out across the gray sky. At around four, another bus, the last I will see arrive tonight, drives into the square. It is so quickly surrounded by the taxi drivers and bus chasers that it can\u2019t even park; eventually the bus driver simply gives up and leaves the bus in the middle of the road.\n\nI watch a gray-haired man, whose jacket says locktite on it in large letters, disembark and get into a debate with a taxi driver. He has a huge fabric bag that he wants to maneuver to the pickup behind the taxi, but there is no room to carry it around the taxi amidst all this traffic, and the taxi won\u2019t move. Eventually, the bag is literally dragged up the taxi\u2019s hood, over its roof, and down across its trunk. The man tells me his name is Salah. He is a painter, and he has been living in Syria since March 2005 after a letter containing a bullet was delivered to his Baghdad address, but went back last week to collect his mother and his sister. (This ride to Damascus has cost them $50 each, but his ticket to Baghdad was only half that: the market forces of fear.) He couldn\u2019t believe how much worse Baghdad seemed than when he had left. He\u2019d heard about all the bodies on the streets these days, the ones people are scared to remove because of snipers, but to see them is something else. The one he won\u2019t forget was the man who had been beheaded and then laid on the ground chest down, his head placed on top of his back.\n\nLast night Salah and his family didn\u2019t sleep at all, packing and repacking their three bags and that huge fabric sack. His mother and sister wanted to take the TV or the satellite dish, but he wouldn\u2019t let them; they already had too much. As they left the house they were crying, knowing that, unless the situation changes, they may never see Iraq again. They pulled out of the Baghdad bus station at nine in the morning, and the bus\u2014full but comfortable, with air-conditioning\u2014stopped only once, at a roadside restaurant in Ramadi where you can get provisions and visit the mosque, and where the three of them had some tea. After Ramadi, there\u2019s nothing but desert. Desert, says Salah, and anxiety. Everybody knows of the robbers who hold you up. The armed factions who might stop you. He worried the whole way to the border.\n\nBut for them, nothing bad happened. They were through the Iraqi border by ten at night, and through the Syrian border by midnight. That was when they allowed themselves to feel happy, and congratulated each other.\n\n\n\nWhen the bombing of Iraq started on March 20, 2003, international humanitarian agencies feared a great exodus. They made preparations for a flood of people escaping over the borders, but the people never came. Most Iraqis, it turned out, deeply prized their way of life, and it would take a lot more than a coalition-load of shock and awe to get Iraqis to abandon their homes, their careers, and everything they knew.\n\nSo consider how things must now be\u2014that millions who refused to leave back then feel they must now do so.\n\n\n\nIn Jaramana, one of the other Damascus neighborhoods where Iraqis have congregated, I visit a woman who I have been told would be happy to talk with me at her son\u2019s apartment. His name is Nasir. As I speak to his mother, he sits on the sofa opposite with his wife. The TV is on, as it will be in most Iraqi homes I visit, turned down but not turned off in deference to my presence. Nasir\u2019s mother explains how her husband died in 2005\u2014 \u201Cdestroyed,\u201C she says, \u201Cby the war\u201C\u2014and describes Baghdad\u2019s deterioration. \u201CI saw a lot of terrible things. I saw a lot of dead bodies dropped on the road, eaten by dogs in the streets.\u201C She can barely hide her frustration that I seem to be another one with plenty of the sincere, meaningless patter that they don\u2019t need and none of the real practical help that they do. \u201CSometimes we feel very shy when we ask for help,\u201C she says, staring me down in a way that somewhat cuts against her meaning. \u201CLike money.\u201C\n\nOccasionally, as I offer her a mixture of explanation, apologies, and questions, Nasir chips in with pieces of his own story as a musician in Iraq. Eventually, he fetches a CD of a song he has written. \u201CIt is for world peace,\u201C he explains, \u201Cfor peace in Iraq.\u201C Its verses are in Arabic, but its choruses, which swell in full soaring choir-backed telethon style, are in English:\n\nIn the freedom of the bird\n\nLet me live the peace\n\nIn the new baby born\n\nLet me touch the peace\n\nLet me live in a peace\n\nNasir suggests that this song bears some responsibility for the death threat he received in the week after his marriage last year, the week he had to leave Iraq. That was also around the same time, his wife points out, that his brother-in-law was kidnapped, choked to death, and left naked in a pool of dirty water. When they reached Syria, his wife sold all her jewelry and gave $5,000 to a man here who\u2019d been a neighbor back in Iraq and who promised he could smuggle them to England via Sudan. Her sister gave the man the same amount of money, too. \u201CBut he deceived us,\u201C she says. Nothing happened. They still see that old neighbor sometimes in the street here in Syria, but he just denies that he has their money. What can they do? They say they now rely on the kindness of friends each month to pay the rent and don\u2019t know how much longer they\u2019ll manage. Nasir\u2019s aunt on his father\u2019s side has been in America for thirty years\u2014she has a kebab restaurant in Maryland\u2014and they have filed documents to join her there, but to no effect.\n\nThe most remarkable part of Nasir\u2019s story seeps out only when he talks about life under Saddam. \u201CWe did not have the perfect life in Saddam\u2019s time,\u201C he says, \u201Cbut the one thing he offered to his people was peace and living in safety.\u201C He adds, as an afterthought, that for him there was one particularly personal downside to the old days. \u201CAlso, he made me sing songs for Saddam.\u201C He explains how he was required to sing on TV in praise of the leader while a montage of images illustrated Saddam\u2019s greatness. \u201CI had to,\u201C he says. \u201CI didn\u2019t like to, but I had to. If I would not, I would be in prison.\u201C (He illustrates this last phrase by acting out an impression not of someone being thrown behind bars but, rather, having his throat cut.)\n\nIt is only slowly, in discussing the youth TV channel, Al Shebab, on which this singing would be broadcast, that Nasir lets slip the full, extraordinary nature of his former position and predicament. \u201CI was controlled,\u201C he says, \u201Cby his son Uday.\u201C Saddam\u2019s eldest son ran the station, but it turns out that Nasir\u2019s connection with him went beyond that. \u201CHe dealt with me,\u201C Nasir explains, \u201Clike I was his personal singer.\u201C If Uday threw a party, or if he just wanted someone to sing for him, he would call on Nasir. Nasir had no choice in the matter.\n\nIn 1996, Uday had what Nasir diplomatically refers to as \u201Chis accident\u201C (he was shot seventeen times by assassins but somehow survived). Nasir says when he heard that Uday\u2014a terrifying boss at the best of times\u2014had woken up in the hospital and asked for the names of people working at the TV station, he decided that it would be best to slip out of the country. For the next five years, Nasir lived in Tunisia, Syria, and Lebanon, teaching music, until in 2001 he was told he must leave Lebanon. He had nowhere to go but back to Iraq. He would have been killed if he\u2019d simply announced himself at the border, so now he had to smuggle himself home, via Turkey and the Kurdish north. For the last year and a half of Saddam\u2019s reign, he lived in hiding, fearing for his life. Even so, he has found little to rejoice in what has happened since.\n\n\u201CIraq was like a body with a cancerous tumor,\u201C Nasir concludes. \u201CWhen the Americans came, they tried to remove the sick part, but it didn\u2019t work. It became the whole body.\u201C\n\n\n\nThat evening, back down in Sayyida Zeinab, I discover that Iraq\u2019s soccer team is playing against Iran in the final of the West Asian Football Federation Championship, the match being broadcast live on TV. It\u2019s an encounter that is charged in many ways. Iran and Iraq were at war for eight years in the \u201980s. These days, many Sunni Iraqis consider the Shia majority in Iraq, and their militias, to be in thrall of, and controlled by, Iran. (However true this may or may not be, it is not baseless paranoia. One of the most feared Shia militias, the Badr Organization, was originally formed by exiled Iraqis in Iran long before the first American bombs fell.) In Sayyida Zeinab, these tensions might be expected to be particularly acute; Iraqi Street is only a few hundred yards from the center of Damascus\u2019s Iranian community around the mosque, and though this is said to be a predominantly Shia area, many of the people I meet on the street here are Sunni.\n\nEither way, only one team is being supported tonight on Iraqi Street. The excitement builds as the match progresses. Iran, the heavy favorite, take a 2\u20130 lead, but when, in the second half, the Iraqis pull back a goal, the street erupts. Crowds of people bulge out of every shop that has a TV. The falafel takeaway is too heaving with spectators to get even a glimpse of what is going on, but I manage to stand on the steps of a barbershop and see the last few minutes. The Iraqis greet each unsuccessful attack by their players as though it is a goal\u2014as though the very possibility of triumph is itself the greatest of triumphs. But when the final whistle blows, they haven\u2019t scored again. Iran are champions.\n\nSoccer, with its low scoring and unpredictable outcomes, is a game that favors frustration over release, and in the aftermath to all soccer matches\u2014except, perhaps, in America\u2014emotions tend to be overcharged. So it is understandable when a middle-aged Iraqi who feels that he has been driven out of his country due to events created by the 2003 invasion might react as he does when he sees someone so clearly Western standing in his path as he leaves the barbershop.\n\nHe has a couple of thoughts he\u2019d like to share. To do so, he steps up to me, closer than is necessary or comfortable, and starts speaking into my face, louder than is necessary or comfortable.\n\n\u201CWe lost to the Iranians 2\u20131 in the football match,\u201C he tells me. \u201CThis team, in spite of all their sufferings\u2014bombs, abduction, all their suffering in Iraq\u2014they are still playing, they are still fighting for the game.\u201C He grabs hold of my right forearm. \u201CAnd we\u2019re not just going to win in football. We\u2019re going to win and defeat America and send them out of Iraq. Kick them out of Iraq.\u201C He squeezes my forearm tighter. \u201CAmerica is actually losing in Iraq. We kill a hundred Americans in Iraq every day, and eventually they\u2019ll have to leave. Do you understand?\u201C\n\nI say that I understand what he is saying.\n\n\u201CIt won\u2019t be good enough for us just to win,\u201C he says. \u201CThey\u2019re going to leave Iraq with their shame and the scandal. Do you agree with me? Do you agree with me?\u201C He presses his face even closer and squeezes even harder. It\u2019s beginning to hurt. \u201CAre you happy with what I\u2019m saying to you?\u201C I repeat that I understand his words. He squeezes one more time and then his grip, and his intensity, relas. \u201COf course,\u201C he says suddenly, as though finishing a formal speech from a lectern, \u201CI want to conclude that we thank the Syrian government and the president for their hospitality and for the open arms that they received us with.\u2026\u201C\n\nWhile he has been hectoring me, a crowd has been gathering. Their mood is more curious than intimidating, but the hubbub seems something that would be better to step away from. As I do so, another, younger Iraqi strikes up a conversation.\n\n\u201CYou American?\u201C\n\n\u201CEnglish.\u201C\n\nHe nods. \u201CI apologize for you,\u201C he says.\n\nAt first I think he has misspoken and is apologizing either for the confrontation moments ago or for his minor mistake over my nationality. But then, seeing his dismissive snarl as he twists away, I realize that the mistake is completely mine. The words he has spoken are precisely the words he means.\n\n\n\nOmar, who has been in Syria since last November, runs a gym for Iraqis, which is where I find him. (It was previously a gym for Syrians, but now nearly all the clientele is Iraqi, working out in one large, sweaty room on basic but professional equipment.) In his office, we are continually interrupted by young men who stream in and out, mostly buying supplements: Creapure, Mega Fat Burner, Super Amino 1000. Now and again as we talk, Omar picks up a small pair of pliers and opens and closes them with his hand. He has shoulder-length hair\u2014which later, after his workout, he will straighten with a small pink plastic comb\u2014and almost the saddest eyes I have ever seen. After a while, he hands me a tiny rectangular photograph of a young Iraqi: his youngest brother, Marwan. He has five brothers; two have been killed in the past eighteen months. Marwan was one of them. I put the photograph down on the stool in front of me, where it sits, staring upward, for the rest of our conversation.\n\nOmar, whose father worked on the railways in Baghdad, is Sunni. He says he knows that the Sunni are considered to have been beneficiaries of Saddam\u2019s regime, but it didn\u2019t seem quite like that in his family. His eldest brother, Muhammad, had been sentenced to death in 1984 when he was caught trying to cross the border to Turkey to escape military service during the Iran-Iraq war. (That sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and then, two years later, in one of Saddam\u2019s occasional presidential pardons, he was released.) In the wake of this latest war, Marwan was trying to work within the system of the new Iraq\u2014he was a policeman. But because he was Sunni, he was still considered a target for the militias. In February 2006, they came to the family house looking for all of the brothers, but only Marwan was there, so he was arrested. Omar says that since the election of the current Shia prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, these militias operate in tandem with government forces and have fully infiltrated the Interior Ministry run by Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim. \u201CI would say it\u2019s racial massacre on a massive scale,\u201C he says. \u201CGenocide.\u201C (Many Sunnis will tell me the same thing, pointing to al-Maliki\u2019s ascendancy as the moment when life in Iraq became impossible for them. This is also why a disproportionate number of the Iraqis leaving their country right now seem to be Sunni.) The men took Marwan away, blindfolded and handcuffed, and hoisted him up on a pulley system used to lift engines out of cars. The hook was connected to his handcuffs, and they would lift him until his shoulders dislocated. When he passed out from the pain, they would throw water on him, hit him with electric cables, and order him to confess. \u201CConfess what?\u201C he replied. \u201CI have nothing to say.\u201C He was locked up in a government prison.\n\nA week after Marwan was arrested, something else happened (something Marwan wouldn\u2019t learn about until he was released nine months later). The second oldest of the brothers, Othman, was fixing his car engine in the street outside their house at seven in the morning. A car pulled up next to him, two other cars blocked either end of the street, and he was shot. Othman tried to run into the house, but the first bullet had damaged his elbow so badly that he couldn\u2019t keep his balance and fell. He was finished off on the ground.\n\nOver those nine months, the family spent all their savings trying to get Marwan freed and paid $4,000 in bribes to reduce his torture. Afterward, Marwan would tell of what happened to other prisoners, of how they would rape a man\u2019s wife in front of him, or sexually abuse him, to make him write a confession. \u201CThat\u2019s why we paid all that money,\u201C says Omar, wryly but completely in earnest. \u201CTo get him just to be beaten, nothing more. The torture was casual for my brother\u2014he was just beaten like hell, basically.\u201C\n\nThat summer, the Americans inspected the jail, discovering the torture rooms and the unofficial punishment regime being run within it, and conditions improved for a while. Eventually, a lawyer hired by Omar\u2019s family had the case brought before a judge, who ruled that it was an issue of personal vengeance and hatred. In November last year, Marwan was released.\n\nDuring his imprisonment, his family had moved to a safer area, but now that he was free, Marwan wanted to go back to visit the old neighborhood to see his friends and get a haircut. But no one is that free in Baghdad anymore. While he was in the barbershop, someone called up the Mahdi Army and said they had a fix on someone who worked as a translator for the Americans. (They were lying.) Soon after, a man walked in, asked if he could wash his hands, and shot Marwan six times in the head.\n\nI pick up Marwan\u2019s photograph.\n\n\u201CWhen I think of my brother\u2026\u201C Omar says. \u201CIf they brought me the blood of Abdul Aziz, I would drink it.\u201C\n\n\n\nOmar tells me all of this barely before I have said hello. My instinct, when I first arrived in Damascus, was to begin conversations by asking people to describe their lives in Iraq when they were younger, partly because I felt I knew so little about everyday Iraqi life in the Saddam years, but also as a way to ease toward more difficult discussions. But I soon realized that this approach was hopeless. If I wanted to hear anything at all about those things, I needed to wait until much later, because when I first sat down it made no difference which questions I asked; within half a sentence they would be telling me about their current predicament and detailing the unbearable horrors they had experienced. It\u2019s as though, for Iraqis today, their present, and their recent past, press so heavily upon them that, until it is released, the rest of their life is inaccessible and irrelevant.\n\n\n\nIn Baghdad, Omar used to run a CD shop\u2014mostly Iraqi music but also some Whitney, Britney, Shakira, and Ricky Martin\u2014and work as a sound engineer. He has never run a gym before, but for years he has been a serious bodybuilder and powerlifter, competing in national championships. Bodybuilding has a long tradition in Iraq; when I ask him why, he says, with a mischievous but poignant smile, it is because \u201CIraqis are vicious and strong.\u201C He thinks this gym helps Iraqis. They have nothing in Syria to fill their time, but here, for about $10 a month, they have something to do, they meet people, and maybe they can forget for a while. \u201CThe psychological burdens they have inside,\u201C he says. \u201CIt gives you a motive. Life is nothing for Iraqis at the moment. We\u2019re just waiting for the mercy of God.\u2026\u201C\n\nHe estimates that two-thirds of the people who come to the gym are Shia, most of the rest Sunni. It\u2019s not a problem here, in Damascus and in this gym. If there is a small miracle to be found in this current situation, it is that those groups who now kill each other within Iraq nonetheless seem able to coexist outside\u2014but it is a provisional miracle, renewed only one day at a time. Omar says he thinks people have changed since the occupation. \u201CYes, life was difficult under Saddam\u2014it was hard to make money or get stuff. But your families, your friends, your relatives were there. There was no Sunni or Shia. No matter who you were, if you talked about sectarianism under Saddam Hussein, you would be beheaded.\u201C (Religious tolerance, in other words, was enforced.)\n\nWhen I ask him about his childhood in Baghdad, there is a long pause.\n\n\u201CI wish I was never an Iraqi,\u201C he says. He looks sickened\u2014by his words, by his situation, by everything. \u201CGod damned me by making me an Iraqi.\u201C\n\n\n\nThe tipping point after which the stream of Iraqi refugees turned into a torrent seems to have been the bombing and destruction of the golden-domed Shia shrine in Samarra on February 22, 2006, and the unrestrained sectarian war it triggered. At that time, few Iraqis chose to register with UNHCR when they reached Syria. Upon arrival at the border, Iraqis were given guest visas to be renewed every three months, which allow them to stay but not work and offer them no automatic right to public services like health care and education. Then, in January of this year, the Syrian government, clearly alarmed at this overwhelming influx of Iraqis and its effects, announced that Iraqis would be granted visas for fifteen days only and that they would not be granted a further visa until they had spent a month out of the country. Effectively, Syria would no longer be a place of refuge.\n\nIn the days that followed, six or seven thousand people teemed around the central UNHCR offices in Damascus\u2014mostly people who hadn\u2019t registered but now hoped that doing so might offer them protection from this new law. Seeing the unrest caused, and under international pressure, the Syrian government reversed its decision four days later. The three-month guest visas were reinstated, and for the moment the Syrian government seems committed to keeping the border open. The great, largely unspoken fear is that the Syrians will change tack once more, but the indications UNHCR are receiving this summer suggest otherwise. Nonetheless, UNHCR, realizing that they could no longer cope with the potential refugee numbers at their central office, have now moved their registration process a few miles out of the city, to a warehouse in Duma.\n\nOne Tuesday morning in late June, I visit. There are two separate areas here, for refugees at different stages of the process. In the first, Iraqis queue in a courtyard simply to make an appointment for a registration interview. Most of these have arrived in the country over the past week. To begin with, it was richer Iraqis who moved to Syria, but in recent months many of those coming have been poorer. Where people mostly came by car, now they mostly come by bus. (There are no official figures about how many Iraqis are arriving in Syria right now, but one UNHCR official says their sense is that it\u2019s between one and two thousand a day.) As these new arrivals file past a table, they are asked some questions intended to identify anyone who needs particularly urgent help and given an information sheet and a form to fill in before their interview. They will have plenty of time to do so; on the day I was there, appointments were being given for January 21, 2008, nearly seven months away.\n\nA woman holds the pieces of paper she has just been handed.\n\n\u201CIs that it?\u201C she asks. As I know from the people I have been speaking with, Iraqis have great and often unrealistic hopes of what can result from this UNHCR processing, and they are often left disappointed.\n\nThe second area at the UNHCR center is for the 500 or so who are returning today for their interview appointment made months ago. They wait in rows in a covered compound that holds a play area for their children. I watch a family of five go through their registration interview. The father apologizes for his son not being there\u2014he is psychologically troubled and felt unable to come today. The militia tortured him for three days, his father explains, scarring his back and left hand, until they made a phone call and confirmed what his son had been telling them all along: that they had made a mistake and that he, like them, was Shia. The interviewer methodically takes the family through a long list of questions to establish their background, their experiences, and their situation. Pinned to the wall are two long lists of Arabic words with their English translations. One is of army ranks and units: legion, brigade, division, regiment, battalion, and so on. The other is of diseases and anatomical terms: lung infection, testicle, nephreotomy, hemorrhoids, etc. The military and the medical; the twin international languages of misery.\n\nOnce their details have been collected, the file will be studied and a decision will be made whether to put this family forward for resettlement. Though UNHCR is understandably reluctant to specify the exact criteria by which this decision is made, resettlement tends to be for those whose present situation is judged to be unusually vulnerable\u2014for instance, unaccompanied children, some women-headed households, those with certain medical needs that can\u2019t be dealt with where they are, and those who are in very specific jeopardy even outside Iraq. Though few of the Iraqis I meet can conceive that the particular horrors they have suffered could not possibly be more than enough to qualify them for any such list, most will not. UNHCR officials try to make clear that resettlement can be a solution for nothing but a small minority. The only logical alternatives are a safe return to their Iraqi homes (considered unlikely in the foreseeable future by both the refugees and aid organizations) or, their hosts allowing, to settle in Syria (which Iraqis seem reluctant to consider as a long-term solution). Most Iraqis I speak with imagine that a third country will come to their rescue, but the cold numbers are depressing. Of the 1.4 million Iraqis they believe are here, UNHCR hopes to resettle 7,000 this year. (Last year, of 14.2 million refugees worldwide, UNHCR resettled just 30,000.) Some countries also accept refugees directly, but nowhere near the numbers to satisfy such a need. That is why the air here at the UNHCR center is charged, almost unbearably, with two opposite but wretchedly coupled emotions: the first, hope, forever being chased down, smothered, and choked at birth by its ugly Siamese twin, hope unfulfilled.\n\n\n\nI first meet Ibrahim on the street corner in Sayyida Zeinab. His body is slightly hunched, some of his movements are restricted and, through the valley created by the one open button of his red shirt, I can see the beginning of the awful scarring that covers his chest. Ibrahim says it was on the fourth day of his torture\u2014a Thursday\u2014that his kidnappers gave up hope of learning anything useful from him. That is when, he says, they covered him with gasoline, set him on fire, and left his charred body for dead in a roadside dumpster.\n\nIbrahim, the youngest of four sons, was born into a Sunni family twenty-four years ago. One of his brothers died in the Iran-Iraq war, and he maintains it was sadness over this that killed his mother. To avoid military service himself, Ibrahim escaped Iraq when he was 18 and started a new life in Jordan. There he got a job making sand-filled souvenirs and spent his free time playing chess. Other jobs followed, though his heart was set on being a mobile-phone repairman. He was happy there in Jordan, but in 2005 he got into a fight with his latest boss, at a truck-repair shop, because the boss wouldn\u2019t pay Ibrahim the $450 he was owed in back wages: \u201CHe started saying stuff about my honor, so I hit him with a fist in his face.\u2026\u201C The police didn\u2019t care about Ibrahim\u2019s side of the story. He was thrown out of the country without even a chance to pick up his belongings: his clothes, his TV, his blender, his stove. For a young Iraqi man like him, these weren\u2019t just his possessions; they were his prospects. \u201CI always said, when I go back to Iraq, I will use these and get married,\u201C he says forlornly. Instead he was dumped at the border, penniless, and had to rely on the kindness of some Bedouins to take him toward Baghdad.\n\nFriends had told him that life was all right in Iraq, but that was not what he found. \u201CI didn\u2019t like it,\u201C he says, \u201Cbecause at any moment you could be dead.\u201C Ibrahim found himself calling for dawn prayers at the mosque next door, his the voice the locals heard booming from the minaret before the sun appeared. \u201CJust for God,\u201C he says. \u201CIt doesn\u2019t have any payment.\u201C After six months, some Americans stopped him, took him into their Hummer, and quizzed him for information about any insurgents who prayed at the mosque. He told them that people hardly made such declarations publicly when they worshipped. The Americans told him they wouldn\u2019t torture or imprison him but that from now on he had to give them information when they asked. Feeling trapped, he ran away to his aunt\u2019s house in a different neighborhood and lived there for a while. (Ibrahim paints an appalling picture of the Americans in Iraq as men who deliberately expose themselves in the street, use candy to entice Iraqi children to act as human shields around them, and routinely threaten and commit rape. Few of the specific stories I will hear in Syria, about Iraqis or Americans, can be easily corroborated, but while I daresay those I speak with are sometimes prone to the biases and omissions you might expect\u2014the urge to cast themselves less as the protagonist and more as the wronged innocent, for instance\u2014I very rarely get the sense they are telling me anything other than what they believe to be true.)\n\nTwo weeks after he\u2019d moved to his aunt\u2019s house, Ibrahim got a call from the mosque telling him it would be safe again. He resumed calling for dawn prayers for the next two and a half months, until the night in April 2006 when men from the Badr Organization, all dressed in black, paid a visit. It was about four thirty in the morning. Three people were praying inside the mosque\u2014the militia men shot them dead. About Ibrahim, their leader had second thoughts: \u201CDon\u2019t kill him. Let\u2019s get information out of him, and then we\u2019ll kill him.\u201C They put a bag over his head, tied his hands with nylon rope, and threw him in a car. All he remembers thinking was that he hoped they would shoot him in the head, because you felt less pain than when they shoot you in the body.\n\nThey drove for two hours till they reached a farm, where he was left in a room with forty-one other people who had also been kidnapped. He recognized no one, and nobody spoke. \u201CEveryone,\u201C he says, \u201Cwas consumed with their own pain.\u201C Each day, the kidnappers took him for torture. They hit him with cables and ran electric currents through him. They questioned him about a local figure\u2014a hero and the head of the insurgency in his neighborhood. Over and over, they asked Ibrahim if he knew him. Over and over, he said no.\n\nIn truth, Ibrahim did know him. But he knew that if he said so and told them where he was, his family would be killed by the insurgents in revenge. That\u2019s why, even when the kidnappers offered him $10,000 for the information, he refused. Back in the room with the forty-one others, he thought of how he might escape. There was a guard at the door; sometimes he fell asleep and his weapon fell loose. Ibrahim tried to work out whether he could get the weapon and kill the guard in one motion, and he was waiting for his chance when they changed his place in the room. Now he was too far away. He\u2019d missed the moment.\n\nOn the fourth day, the Thursday, when again he told his captors that he had nothing to confess, they retorted that they were going to kill him. \u201CFine,\u201C he said. \u201CKill me.\u201C So they threw the gasoline on him and set him alight. On fire, Ibrahim started running around, flailing, and the kidnappers got worried\u2014this was a room with lots of flammable equipment and artillery in it\u2014so they wrapped a blanket around him. That\u2019s when he fainted. He thinks he went into a coma.\n\nHe didn\u2019t wake up until Saturday. He was surrounded by trash, his shirt was melted to his body, and he couldn\u2019t get up. \u201CI tried and I tried and I tried,\u201C he remembers. Eventually, he succeeded. He found himself by a road, and the first car that passed took him to hospital. There the doctors told the driver he would probably die; when one of them looked at Ibrahim\u2019s wounds, he started crying.\n\nIbrahim remained in the hospital for a month and left not because he was better but because the militias started visiting. He headed for Fallujah, where money was gathered for him at the mosques, and came to Syria in November 2006. Ibrahim says that a driver from Ramadi helped him at first, getting him food when his hands were still too burnt, but that eventually the driver stole his $600 and his passport. For four days he slept on the street, until the owner of a bakery offered him somewhere to stay. After that\u2026there seems to be chain of friends who have helped and then let him down.\n\nIbrahim tells me all this back at the room where he stays. (He doesn\u2019t want to speak in the street. One friend he was living with threw him out because he spoke to foreigners.) For now, he lives in a single room with two others, thin foam mattresses on its floor, but he says he had to sell his watch for $16 to complete this month\u2019s rent and that he has no idea how he can pay next month\u2019s. He is waiting to be rescued.\n\n\u201CSince I was a child, I was always watching movies about Australia,\u201C he says. \u201CMy wish in life is to go there, for even an hour. Just watch it and leave.\u201C\n\nIf he could stay longer, he would like to repair mobiles\u2014or, most of all, deliver newspapers door-to-door on a bicycle. \u201CI would sleep on the sidewalks there. If it\u2019s the sidewalks in Australia, that\u2019s fine by me. Definitely, the sidewalks are nice there. Not like here, where they\u2019re full of trash and garbage.\u201C\n\nAnd if not there, almost anywhere else. He doesn\u2019t want to live in an Arab country anymore. Sweden would be good. Like many Iraqis, he has heard about Sweden\u2019s pioneering example. (A gruesome fact: In 2006, a town called Sodertalje, a few minutes south of Stockholm, took more refugees than the U.S.A. and Britain combined.) \u201CIf I go to Sweden,\u201C he promises, \u201CI will kiss each and every inch of the soil, and then I will kneel down and kiss the foot of every Swedish citizen.\u201C\n\nNo one could dispute Ibrahim\u2019s injuries or his suffering\u2014he mentions his humiliation at having to beg someone to help him on with his shirt each morning\u2014though troublesome thoughts do congregate. When he says that they hurt him taking care of his wounds at the free hospital and so he won\u2019t go back, and you hear of other medical help he has been offered and has spurned, it\u2019s hard to avoid the awful suspicion that he feels, perhaps understandably and even accurately, that his terrible wounds are the only card he has to play. The horrifying scabs on his chest are something of a mystery, too. I hear he has told people before now that he was drilled as part of his torture and that these awful scabs were the result, but when I ask him, he tells me that though the kidnappers did threaten to drill him, they never did, and that he has never said that they did. He thinks a friend of his may have said it about him because his friend\u2019s brother was drilled. He adds that maybe it would be better for him to tell people that he was drilled but that he won\u2019t say it because it\u2019s not the truth. \u201CI used to lie under torture,\u201C he tells me. \u201CBut for you I\u2019m telling the truth.\u201C\n\nAt one point in our conversations, when I express a hope\u2014sincerely, but perhaps rather feebly\u2014that things have been so bad for so long that surely there must soon be a better future, Ibrahim leaps down my throat.\n\n\u201CWhat future?\u201C he demands. \u201CWhat do you mean, \u0091the future\u2019? What future are you talking about? If I continue to live like this, I\u2019m going to get intoxicated with infections, and I\u2019m going to die.\u2026\u201C He says worse than this. When I ask him whether he\u2019ll ever go back to Iraq, he replies: \u201CNever. Even if they fill it with gold I am not going to go back there.\u201C Except, he says, if he stays in Syria till November and nothing good happens for him. In that case, he declares, he has a plan\u2014a plan that I think and hope is just an expression of his despair rather than a concrete course of action. \u201CI\u2019ll go back there as a bomb,\u201C he says, \u201Cas a living bomb, and I\u2019ll ask where the Badr legions are, and then I\u2019ll bomb myself and them.\u201C\n\nI hope that doesn\u2019t happen, I say.\n\n\u201CI wish that wouldn\u2019t happen,\u201C he agrees. \u201CBecause I am a young guy, and I want to live my youth. You never know what\u2019s going to happen: getting tortured, on fire, being here, getting out of here. You never know.\u2026 Hopefully, when people know the truth, they are going to do something.\u2026\u201C\n\nHe fetches a plastic bag, shows me his UNHCR registration document and a book of snapshots from happier times: by the sea, at a university, in a candy shop, meeting a famous Iraqi actor, with various friends. As we talk, his mood changes frequently, from a nervy, unconfident sweetness to a perfectly explicable stew of anger, self-pity, and despair. \u201CWhy am I living?\u201C he asks. \u201CWhat\u2019s the reason I\u2019m alive? For what?\u201C He says he understands the purpose of speaking to someone like me, even if I can\u2019t provide him with what he most wants. \u201CThe person who is sleeping,\u201C he declares, \u201Cneeds someone to wake him up.\u201C But the question he then asks me\u2014\u201CDo you think they\u2019re going to wake up?\u201C\u2014just hangs there, its answer lost in our foul global maelstrom of conflicting motivations and unmanageable messes.\n\n\n\nHere is where I would like to explain that, as horrific as so many of these stories are, I have not fully represented the many other Iraqis I met in Syria whose experiences\u2014while nonetheless difficult enough to make them leave their country\u2014did not involve direct contact with death threats or the murder and kidnapping of family members.\n\nI would very much like to explain that, but it would not be true. Some such Iraqis must exist, but although I have found people in all kinds of ways\u2014on the street, in restaurants and businesses, through charities, at the UNHCR center, as they arrive in the country, through translators, through each other\u2014if there is a large population less touched by the events of the past four or so years, I have failed to find them. Naturally those with the worst tales may be more likely to tell them but, as far as I can judge, the spread of awful experiences related in this article are still reasonably typical. Imagine then\u2014as you consider the stories here and by how many thousands of times each must be multiplied to represent the overall experience of these Iraqi refugees\u2014the collective mountain of pain and horror that is theirs.\n\n\n\nTalking to Iraqis in Syria during the summer of 2007, it\u2019s hard to find someone who\u2019ll say a bad word about Saddam Hussein. I hear some tempered, limited criticism\u2014mostly, as you might expect, from non-Sunnis\u2014but everyone says that they would rather have lived on under his rule than as things are now. As Ibrahim puts it, \u201CThe hell of Saddam is better than the heaven of the Americans.\u201C Even an Iraqi communist I meet, whose brother was hanged by Saddam\u2019s regime and who was forced into exile under threat of death, concludes, remarkably, \u201CIn spite of all the mistakes he committed, there was something about Saddam that was very good.\u201C\n\nOne person I\u2019ve met offers a rather more direct\u2014and stranger\u2014testimony about Hussein: Salah, the painter, the man I found coming off the 4 a.m. bus with his mother and sister. He also worked as a journalist, writing about culture and the arts for a government newspaper where Saddam paid several visits in person. \u201CWe met him, sat with him, talked with him,\u201C he says. \u201CQuite honestly, he had a very, very strong character, but at the same time he\u2019s simple.\u201C As Salah\u2019s statements show, once you enter the incapacitating haze that surrounds a despot, that haze may take some time to clear. When I ask him whether he was scared of Saddam, he pauses, then replies, \u201CEvery citizen, in any country around the world, when they meet the president, they would be a bit intimidated, out of respect.\u201C\n\nBut aren\u2019t I right in saying that sometimes people could be scared of Saddam for good reason?\n\n\u201CThat\u2019s not true. He used to visit houses and see poor people\u2014you must have seen him on TV\u2014and he\u2019d open the refrigerator, check on their food supplies, check that they had enough.\u201C\n\nVisit them at random?\n\n\u201CYes, randomly. All the time. And twice a week he would meet citizens and see who had problems, who needed money, who was sick. And he helped a lot of Arab countries and foreign countries. And he sent aid to Negroes in America at the end of the \u201990s. I don\u2019t know which group particularly, but the ones we would see in films\u2014the poor people, the homeless, sleeping on the sidewalk.\u201C\n\nWhen I ask whether Salah ever tried to paint Saddam, he says that it was difficult to get a good likeness. In Saddam portraiture, it was the eyes that were so difficult, and having gazed into those eyes himself, Salah well understood the problem. \u201CHis eyes were very beautiful,\u201C he explains to me, earnestly. \u201CThey were greenish blue, his eyes. And he was very slim and tall.\u201C\n\n\n\nThrough another chain of acquaintances, I meet a 17-year-old girl called Zamzam, at times a bouncy teenager who enthuses about Harry Potter and tells wry stories about the double take of an American soldier when he saw a Spice Girls poster on the wall of her Baghdad bedroom, but also someone carrying a weight, a hopelessness and a cynicism about fate that should have no place in someone so young. The first time I visit her family\u2019s apartment\u2014in Yarmouk, the third center of the Iraqi population in Damascus, a warren of concrete apartment blocks that first grew to accommodate Palestinian refugees\u2014the TV is on, and her father is watching Rachael Ray.\n\n\u201CVery good,\u201C he says, gesturing toward the screen. \u201CI only like her and\u2026\u201C He tries to tell me his other favorite program, but the name is so Arabic that I can\u2019t even make out the contour of the words. Puzzled that I don\u2019t understand, he repeats it. At last I recognize a single syllable\u2014\u201C\u2026fill\u2026\u201C\u2014in its middle, and the penny drops.\n\n\u201CDr. Phil?\u201C I ask.\n\n\u201CYes!\u201C he beams.\n\nHis wife joins us. She is not a woman to mince her words. \u201CThe people who destroyed our country, they should find a solution for us,\u201C she tells me. \u201CWhat can I say to Bush, who has been responsible for the big disaster in my country and in my house? I would like to ask him, would he accept the idea that an American person would be attacked by the Iraqi army in the middle of the night? Would he accept what is happening to the Iraqis happening to the American people? We were living together in peace. If you don\u2019t like Saddam, you can kick him out of his position, but leave the society to live in peace. Twenty-seven million Iraqi people are completely destroyed.\u201C\n\nShe is crying. Behind her, Rachael Ray is showing Dustin Hoffman how to make vegetable couscous.\n\n\n\nThe fantasy, I suppose, would be that there are bad Iraqis, who form militias and insurgencies, and good Iraqis, who are the innocent victims of all this. But the world is rarely so simple, and people don\u2019t act as they have in Iraq\u2014however misguided we may wish to judge some of their actions and motives\u2014without reason. Declaring that people are bad\u2014or, indeed, good\u2014is often a way of refusing to understand, or even hear, them. Sometimes the very least we can each do is bite our lip and listen.\n\nOn a Damascus evening when one thing leads to another, I find myself in a dingy basement room talking with a group of young Iraqi men, mostly Sunni (though at least one is Shia). All are fairly recent arrivals in Syria. There is much bitter talk of Iran\u2019s role in what has happened, and often their arguments veer off into long, ancient doctrinal squabbles, but after a while the conversation shifts from the theoretical to the more practical, sometimes disconcertingly so. We have been talking for perhaps half an hour when they begin to make their argument that the insurgency was not a matter of choice, and soon some of them will slip from referring to the insurgents as \u201Cthey\u201C to \u201Cwe.\u201C Even as they say the things they say, some of them deeply unsettling, these men are, in the Arab tradition, meticulous hosts, sending teenagers out first for cans of Pepsi and then for the Iraqi speciality of sickly-sweet fingers of dough drenched in clear sugar syrup that they insistently press upon me, their guest. Between gifts, words:\n\n\u201CThe Americans are invaders. They are an occupation force, and it\u2019s a legitimate right to fight against them. We did not ask the Americans to come and liberate us from Saddam Hussein\u2019s regime.\u201C\n\n\u201CIf anyone occupies your country, what would you do?\u201C\n\n\u201CThe resistance is becoming stronger and stronger because we are in the right.\u201C\n\n\u201CThe situation under Saddam Hussein was much better. Do you agree?\u201C Then again, much more forcefully, directly to me: \u201CDo you agree?\u201C\n\nI can see why you think that.\n\n\u201CIf someone came to your house, occupied it, took your sons, threw you out of your property, what would you do?\u201C\n\n\u201CIn Islam, those who die defending their families, or their honor, or their houses, are considered martyrs.\u201C\n\nI understand defending, of course\u2026but would you be proud to go and find an American soldier and kill him?\n\n\u201CYes. On one condition.\u201C The speaker stares at me. \u201CI would chop him up.\u201C\n\nIs it fair to consider every person representing America or the coalition as a person who is coming to rob your house or kill your families?\n\n\u201CInside Iraq, the American soldiers are going to be killed. They should be killed. It\u2019s right to kill them. Journalists\u2014\u201C the same speaker looks right at me again, with half a smile\u2014\u201Cand peacemakers, or anyone who\u2019s there for humanitarian reasons to help us, we should not kill them, no. Soldiers should be killed.\u201C\n\nI am offered another sweet pastry.\n\n\u201CThey thought the Iraqis are naive and stupid people, but they\u2019ve faced a different reality. They found militants who made ambushes which dazzled them.\u201C\n\n\u201CFor the Americans, this is their Holocaust. And they can\u2019t leave it.\u2026\u201C\n\nDo you think the American soldiers are evil people? Do you think they\u2019re bad people in their hearts?\n\n\u201CNo. They are not. They\u2019re a chess piece that a ghost is moving\u2014George Bush or Tony Blair. We do think of the soldiers as human beings, but let them take responsibility by taking off their uniforms. If they make that choice, then I\u2019ll treat them as a human being. That\u2019s part of our religion. That\u2019s what happened in some cases, actually. They said, \u0091We surrender and we don\u2019t want to kill any more people,\u2019 and it was the Iraqi insurgents, actually, who got them out of Iraq. The minute they disarm themselves or refuse ethically to participate in the war, to me they are human beings.\u201C\n\nWhat do you think the American soldiers think they are doing?\n\n\u201CThey know they are mistaken. A soldier said to me, \u0091We pay for the mistakes of the American government.\u2019 I said, \u0091How do you mean?\u2019 and he said, \u0091They told the American people that the Iraqi people are enjoying electricity, water, order, safety, security, and have jobs to do. They do propaganda. They are misleading public opinion.\u2019 And who is paying for these mistakes by the American government? The American army.\u201C\n\nWhatever bad things you think they thought, nobody could have wanted what has happened, because what has happened is good for nobody.\n\n\u201CThey wanted things to be this bad.\u201C\n\nI don\u2019t believe that at all. This is a disaster for everybody.\n\n\u201CWe are the biggest loser. Is it better for me to fight you in your house or in my house? Where would I lose more?\u201C\n\nMyself, I would prefer to fight you in neither house.\u2026\n\n(Smiling tolerantly) \u201CYou don\u2019t embrace the ideology of war.\u201C (This is said as if it\u2019s more criticism than compliment.) \u201CWe all wish for peace, but they forced us into war.\u201C\n\nPerhaps we can at least all agree that we wish it hadn\u2019t happened. \n\n\u201CIt\u2019s a wish.\u201C\n\nAs the conversation breaks up, I am left in the room with one Iraqi, younger than most, who has barely said a word. He passes me his mobile phone and shows me a video stored on it: a tribute to Saddam Hussein that starts with footage of him swimming but mostly shows endless shots of him acting presidentially. \u201CWhat do you think of Saddam Hussein?\u201C he says, a teasing tone in his voice. \u201CEverybody Iraqi in Syria love Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein hero. Hero for the Arab.\u201C\n\nHe fiddles around with the phone, looking for something else.\n\n\u201CDo you want to see video of mujahideen hitting Americans?\u201C he asks.\n\nI assume, correctly, that my consent is irrelevant. The footage seems to have been filmed early in the insurgency; there is a 2003 date in the corner of some shots. Near the beginning, there is a large explosion set to an Arabic pop song, and then there is footage of masked men preparing a bomb. The screen cuts to Arabic phrases\u2014\u201Cfirst operation,\u201C \u201Csecond operation,\u201C \u201Cthird operation\u201C\u2014like caption cards in an old silent film, and each close-up footage of the mission\u2019s preparation is followed by more distant footage of trucks and tanks being blown up. Another caption says, \u201CImplanting mines and blasting machines of the enemy.\u201C The young Iraqi seems delighted to have shown me this. He says that most people he knows have footage like this on their phones.\n\nIn the corridor, as I leave, everything is friendly. The men I\u2019ve been speaking with shake hands, and one of them\u2014one of the more moderate voices\u2014smiles and, with his index and middle finger, playfully pretends to shoot me in the middle of my forehead.\n\n\n\nIf I were brave or foolish enough to really want to know what the experience of leaving Iraq was like, I suppose I would have traveled to Baghdad and returned on one of the refugee buses to Sayyida Zeinab. Instead, to at least get some sense of the journey, I arrange to travel to the border crossing between Syria and Iraq and then to join a refugee bus coming from Iraq for its final four hours across the Syrian desert to Damascus. Just before you leave Syria for Iraq, there is a sign, in Arabic and English, presumably placed there in more uncomplicated times:\n\nTHANKS FOR YOUR VISIT\n\n HAPPY JOURNEY\n\nAt the Syrian border, I am allowed over into no-man\u2019s-land. There are four miles of this no-man\u2019s-land before the Iraqi border, and here, on the Syrian edge of it, new arrivals have to leave their vehicles and go into a room to do their visa paperwork before approaching the customs post. It is now late afternoon. The first carful of people I speak with say they had been waiting at the Iraqi border for four hours. The driver says that he has been driving people on this route for two or three years and that over the past couple of months the road has become a lot safer. He says he has been shot at by the Americans only once, when he didn\u2019t stop the instant he was told to. His tires were blown out.\n\nWhen I speak to bus drivers as they arrive, one by one, through the night, it turns out that they have all been delayed today, forced to follow American troop convoys at a prudent distance for hundreds of miles, after which they frantically and dangerously raced each other for the border. Some of them share, or allude to, grim past experiences. One had a Shia taken off his bus a few months ago and had to drive on with one fewer passenger. He doesn\u2019t want to talk about it. \u201CThis is my work,\u201C he says. \u201CThis is what I do to make a living.\u201C (The cheeriest driver I meet is the one who explains that he\u2019s made this risky back-and-forth commute work for him by having two families: One wife and four kids live in Baghdad; his other wife and five more kids live in Damascus.)\n\nEventually, word filters through that one of the buses today has been shot at by the American convoy fifteen minutes before the border and had its front windshield broken. I find the bus in the customs area, its driver seated behind the wheel, open to the air. He says everyone is okay, but he seems freaked-out. He insists no bullets were involved. It was simply the wind that broke his windshield. The wind. But his face, and the concern of those milling around, suggests a very different story. \u201CHe\u2019s afraid if he tells you about it,\u201C another driver explains, \u201Che will get his neck cut when he goes back to Iraq.\u201C\n\n\n\nSometime around one in the morning, the bus I have arranged to join arrives at the Syrian side of no-man\u2019s-land, but once the formalities are completed it is 4:25 a.m.\u2014more than nine hours behind schedule\u2014that we finally pull away. When I ask the driver to tell me about the journey he\u2019s done that took the longest between Baghdad and Damascus, he says, \u201CThis one.\u201C\n\nThe bus company has been incredibly gracious and helpful in arranging for me and the photographer to travel on this bus, but all the buses are full so there was no possibility of having our own seats. (I don\u2019t think, anyway, I could tolerate the thought that I had been personally responsible for someone having to stay in Iraq even for a single extra day.) When this was to be an early-evening drive into Damascus, I had imagined roaming up and down the aisle with my notebook, talking to whoever was prepared to talk, but that\u2019s no longer an option; everyone seems deep in endurance mode, shattered, asleep or drifting toward it. My new plan is to sit in the stairwell leading down to the bus\u2019s middle entrance, but when I get there, I slightly regret it: The toilet door is broken, and it swings open, hitting me and wafting toilet stench over me, with every movement of the bus. Still, given the circumstance, I\u2019m hardly minded to complain.\n\nAnyway, as it turns out, a group of young Iraqi men at the back of the bus intervene. This may be partly because I am sitting where they like to go periodically to stand and smoke in twos and threes, but I\u2019m sure that mostly it\u2019s pure hospitality. Never mind that they are refugees leaving their country and I am a reporter representing the countries they blame for that circumstance; they insist that I take the middle seat at the back while they deal with the lack of a seat by taking turns for cigarette breaks. It\u2019s more fun at the back, certainly. My presence seems to inspire much laughter, some of which seems to be with me and some of which feels like it\u2019s at me, both of which seem fair enough.\n\nAfter a while, one of the youths gets out his mobile, scrolls through the long list of songs on it, and holds up the phone\u2019s speaker. As the song plays, they all kind of dance back and forth in their seats, their hands above their shoulders. Those farther up the bus who are awake look back and smile, seeming to enjoy both the song and the fact that it is being played to me. It is by Iraq\u2019s current music superstar, Hussam Al Rassam, who has made his name with a remarkable series of songs articulating the predicament of contemporary Iraq and its people. This song, \u201CAgruba\u201C (\u201CThe Female Scorpion\u201C), is a huge recent hit\u2014popular because it\u2019s about a girl who\u2019s bad for you yet whom you can\u2019t resist, but also about Baghdad today:\n\nWhen she passes by\n\nYou never know who\u2019s going to live and who\u2019s going to die\n\nAs the sun breaks over the Syrian desert horizon, the man next to me selects another, slower song. As it plays, he starts rhythmically hitting his right fist high up on the left side of his chest. When I don\u2019t join in, he literally takes hold of my right hand and forces the motion upon me, to the greater fascination and amusement of other passengers. Later I discover that it is a Shia mourning gesture, used to indicate great sadness. The song is by the same singer, its translated lyric, in part:\n\nOur world is falling apart\n\nOur country is exhausted\n\nIts well empties of sadness\n\nLeave oh stranger\n\nThis home is for its own people\n\nPure without the contamination of your boots\n\nIn the heat of the dawn, as the bus pulls toward the suburbs, the final leg of their journey of over twenty-three hours, even the energy of the boys at the back begins to flag. The Iraqi to my left suddenly slumps onto my left shoulder, fast asleep. My right arm is stretched out against the back of the seat in front, to balance myself, and a few minutes later the head of the Iraqi to my right also gives way until it finds my right arm as a pillow. If I move an inch I will wake one or both of them, so I don\u2019t. That is how I, and they, enter Damascus.\n\n\n\nIt is traditional, and maybe also polite, in a piece of writing like this to\u2026well, if not to explain how everything might become all right or to draw some kind of road map that should immediately be followed if only the powers that be were as smart and thoughtful as the writer, to at least offer some clear signs of a sunnier tomorrow. I\u2019m sorry to be unable to do that. If anything, what comes most easily are further fears: of what will happen as more Iraqis run out of money, or run out of hope that they will be lifted out of this; of what will happen if sectarian violence spreads out of Iraq (a scenario Syria is unlikely to tolerate). When I left Syria, perhaps the most realistic hope was that what now seemed like limbo for Iraqis here might somehow, in time\u2014as unenthusiastically as most Iraqis greeted this prospect\u2014mutate into something that more closely resembles a worthwhile life. This September, even that prospect came under threat when the Syrian government suddenly closed off Syria as a haven and now required Iraqis to apply for Syrian visas in Baghdad\u2014visas available only to a small minority of cases. The border crossing was reported to be empty. And though there have been no moves to expel those Iraqis already in Syria, their future now seems more uncertain than ever.\n\nIf the Iraqis I met were united in one thought, it was this: that we\u2014that is, you and I\u2014did this to them. And that now we should do something about it. And that, surely, with all our wealth and power and compassion and decency, we would want to and be able to. They want help, not sympathy, and feel so justified in asking for it that they don\u2019t feel obliged to soften their experiences and opinions while doing so. If they are not too worried about any offense they may cause by what they say or describe, that may be because they consider themselves already the subject of an offense they could never hope to equal. It baffles them that nothing much is happening, and many of them assume that it is just a matter of time.\n\nMyself, I\u2019m not sure what our moral responsibilities should be or how we should act on them. But I know this: Each day that these refugees awake into the deadened agony of limbo and exile, they think that we are thinking about their predicament. For the most part we\u2019re not, and I\u2019m sure that we should be.\n\nChris Heath is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/iraq-refugee-syria-war-america?currentPage=12>