Home bittersweet home for returning Iraqis

Many disillusioned, not all regret journey

AZIZIYAH, Iraq, April 2, (AFP): Disappointment, simple homesickness and even the high cost of cigarettes are pushing a growing number of Iraqis to return home after risking everything to reach Europe last year.

Hundreds are coming back every month, most of them with the assistance of the International Organization for Migration.

Many are disillusioned and have spent their savings on smugglers, but not all regret attempting the odyssey.

“What’s that film called again? Groundhog Day, right? Every day is the same here,” Murtada Hamid said of Aziziyah, the town where he was born and which he left last year to join the flow of migrants who braved perilous sea crossings to knock on Europe’s doors.

“You wake up in the morning, the streets still look a mess, the sewage hasn’t been fixed and there’s no work for anybody,” he said.

The town of about 100,000 people 75 kms (45 miles) southeast of Baghdad has hardly any paved roads and is shrouded in a cloud of dust in the summer and bogged in mud in the winter.

Corruption, nepotism and incompetence have ensured that Aziziyah became an example of how years of high oil prices yielded no tangible improvement for many Iraqis.

Murtada, a 26-year-old with a dashing smile, ended up in Erlangen, in Bavaria, where he remembers being struck by the architecture, the clean streets and well-groomed public gardens.

The young man, who has now gone back to college, sometimes talks about his time in Germany as one would of a holiday with slightly below-par food and accommodation.

“I had a girlfriend from Bosnia, it was fun for a while, we enjoyed the nightlife,” he recalled.

His brother Mustafa was more bitter. “I spent all my money, the food was just not edible,” said the 29-year-old chemistry graduate.

“Everything cost an arm and a leg over there. The cheapest cigarettes were six euros (about $6.85) a pack. I had to start smoking rol- lies,” he said.

Before he left, Mustafa dreamt of language courses and professional training but he has now returned with the feeling he was never welcome in Germany.

“It’s a bit scary at night. You’re constantly afraid of being arrested or beaten by these Nazi guys who don’t like refugees,” he said.

“We had to move in groups,” said Mustafa, who was based in Cologne, where a New Year’s Eve wave of sexual assaults blamed on foreigners fanned nationwide tensions over the more than one million asylum seekers Germany took in last year.

Some of the Iraqis who left their country in 2015 were fleeing combat zones, persecution or squalid camps but others like Mustafa and Murtada were simply running away from unemployment and boredom.

A study of the migrant flows from Iraq by the International Organization for Migration reveals that “no hope in the future” was the main reason of departure for 80 percent of respondents.