The refugees’ stories: ‘We returned to Basra but life became too dangerous so I fled back to Jordan’
▶ Suha Ma’ayeh reports from Amman on the plight of those forced by war and sectarianism to find a future elsewhere
Iraq is a land of painful memories for Dirar Jbouri, whose sadness dominates his exile in Jordan.
“We knew each other for three years and were planning to get engaged,” he says of his sweetheart, who was training to become a doctor at Al Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad when she was kidnapped.
“She was threatened because she was a Shiite treating Sunnis at a hospital. Two days later she was dead.”
The murder occurred in April 2007 and the news was broken to him by his love’s sister.
Time passed but life did not get easier.
There was an increase in violence and the sectarian segregation of the capital that began with the fall of Saddam Hussein, symbolised by the toppling of his statue 15 years ago today.
Mr Jbouri had to quit his job as a butcher because the trade was controlled by Shiites in the capital’s Al Rahmaniyah district. Car bombs and suicide attackers became common across Baghdad, and he rarely left his home in Al Harithiyeh.
The Iraq Body Count – a website run by Conflict Casualties Monitor, a UK company – says that period, between July 2006 and June 2007, was the most violent after the US-led invasion, with as many as 31,852 civilian fatalities.
Mr Jbouri fled to Amman in April 2010. Now 46, he works at an Iraqi restaurant in downtown Amman, grilling meat.
The Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, in Norway, estimates there were between 450,000 and 500,000 Iraqis in Jordan as of May 2007.
Many returned home and others settled in other countries. By the end of December last year, there were 66,000 Iraqis in Jordan registered with the UN High Commission for Refugees.
Although parliamentary elections are planned in Iraq next month, the country’s stability is fragile. Citizens such as Mr Jbouri are caught in limbo and lack belief that Iraq can stand on its own feet.
In 2007, he was granted refugee status but his application for resettlement in a third country was denied for unspecified reasons. His two sisters managed to resettle in Canada.
In March last year, Mr Jbouri married a Jordanian. His wife suffered two miscarriages and specialised medical treatment is beyond his means because he earns only 300 Jordanian dinars (Dh1,550) a month.
“In Iraq I had my own business, I had money,” he says. “I lost everything. I am grateful to be here but it is difficult to find a good opportunity at a time when Jordanians themselves do not have jobs.”
Mr Jbouri appears torn by his difficulties, scarred by the past but adamant about one thing: “I will never return to Iraq.”
In another part of town Saddam Jumaily, 42, an artist from Basra, also looks back. He depicted himself and his older sister as children in a painting, holding hands at their home.
“We were so close and I wanted to capture her memory,” Mr Jumaily says of his sister, who was a nurse at a public hospital before she was abducted and killed in April 2012. He found her body three days later at a mortuary. She had been mutilated and there was rope around her neck. He could barely recognise her.
“She was kidnapped and tortured,” Mr Jumaily says. “I identified her from a mole above her right wrist.”
It was the main reason he left in August 2012, when he and his wife Kholoud, 37, became refugees. The war’s aftermath had already led them to leave once before.
While working as a lecturer at the College of Fine Arts at Basra University between 2005 and 2010, Mr Jumaily was threatened many times because he was a Sunni. The risk increased when he caught one of his students cheating during final examinations.
“You do not know who you are messing with. I am from the Mahdi army and I will get you,” the student told him, referring to the militia of Moqtada Al Sadr, a hardline Shiite cleric.
In another incident in August 2010, he found a letter with a bullet on his doorstep with a note that read: “You Baathist, you scum, we will kill you.”
Enough was enough. A few days later Mr Jumaily packed his things and headed for Amman. But despite a year of trying, the UNHCR would not grant him refugee status because he was told Iraq’s security situation had improved.
“We returned to Basra and we hoped that things would change for the better, but unfortunately life became too dangerous,” Mr Jumaily says. “After my sister was killed I lost all hope and fled back to Jordan. Iraq is destroyed and there is no hope.”
He and his wife still hope to be resettled in Europe or the US, although the visa programme for refugees has been curtailed by President Donald Trump’s government.
Other Iraqi refugees seem to have settled in Jordan.
Umm Saad, 47, is an Iraqi mother of four who sells cigarettes and lighters in downtown Amman. She is trying to provide for her seven-year-old son from a second marriage after her Egyptian husband left her. Her three older sons are in Iraq.
Back in Basra, her first husband, a cousin who was born in 1967, fled the army after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and was arrested at a checkpoint and imprisoned.
“He looked like a monster and his ear was cut off,” she says. Umm Saad saw him after his release from Al Zubair Prison after the toppling of Saddam.
Cutting off the ear was a punishment for army deserters. A few months after his release, he died of cancer.
“Life was hard,” Umm Saad says. “There was hunger and poverty.”
Her parents and brothers did not support her, she says. In 2014, she decided to move to Jordan. As a vulnerable refugee, she receives 80 dinars a month from the UNHCR.
She was once accepted for resettlement in the US.
“I called my father,” Umm Saad says. “He said I should take care of my religion since the West does not have religion, and he told me you will change.
“So I was afraid and preferred to stay here.”
She lives in Jabal Al Joufeh, a poor part of town, paying 100 dinars in rent. She suffers from high blood pressure, diabetes and joint pain from sitting all day on a small chair selling cigarettes, earning between five and 10 dinars a day.
But Umm Saad does not want to leave. “I don’t like to travel. I am settled here,” she says.
After my sister was killed I lost all hope and fled back to Jordan. Iraq is destroyed and there is no hope SADDAM JUMAILY Refugee