Displacement of Iraqis takes heavy toll on families

The killers were on the way, and Ahmed Hassan had only a few hours to save his family.

On this day, Aug. 6, 2006, at least 22 Iraqis would die in rising sectarian violence. Hassan, his wife and their children would survive, but at a cost: They would lose their home, and flee their neighborhood.

Nineteen months later, they remain exiled in their own country.

"I do not want to return to my house for the time being because I already lost my house and I do not want to lose my life," Hassan says, his infant twins in his arms.

More than 4 million Iraqi lives are in similar straits — upended by five years of war that has turned neighborhoods into killing fields and sent countless refugee convoys scurrying for the border.

About 2 million people have fled to other countries since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, mostly to Arab neighbors such as Jordan and Syria, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Another 2.4 million people have been displaced but are still in Iraq, some forced out during Saddam Hussein's rule and others since the start of the war in March 2003.

A 2007 year-end report by the International Organization for Migration found that most internally displaced Iraqis left home because of direct threats to their lives.

The displacement crisis is one of the gravest consequences of the war and is among its festering legacies. Regardless of what happens on the battlefield in years to come, the sheer size of the uprooted population is already bigger than the dislocation after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005.

Despite improved security here over the last half-year, attempts to allow people to return are in the earliest stages. Simple homelessness doesn't fully describe the problem.

"It affects every aspect of someone's life," said Karim Khalil, who analyzes the Iraq situation for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. "Access to food, and documentation, access to education, access to health and legal services. There are a whole panoply of issues."

Hassan is part of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority, but members of all of Iraq's ethnic groups have been thrust from their homes. This story could just as easily have been about 27-year-old Mohammed Abdul-Wahab, a Sunni auto mechanic who, like Hassan, is from the Jihad section of western Baghdad; he endured five months of joblessness after Shiite militants warned him and his family to leave their home in 48 hours, or face death.

Hassan, his wife and their four young children lived in two-story home they'd inherited from Hassan's father. Shiites and Sunni Muslims lived side-by-side in the middle-class area until waves of sectarian violence spread across the country after the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February 2006.

Around that time, Hassan joined in a procession to commemorate the seventh-century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a revered Shiite figure. It was enough to earn him a death sentence.

Sunni neighbors tipped him on Aug. 6 that insurgents were on the way to his house to kill Hassan for joining in the religious ritual.

One of those friends volunteered to hide the family. Then, in the afternoon, gunmen arrived outside their house. When they couldn't find Hassan they became enraged, and burned the building down.

The family savings, all in cash, were in the house. Gone. The family's possessions, too: clothes, furniture, everything but what they took into hiding.

Working in the Culture Ministry's printing house, Hassan earned a modest living but nowhere near enough to replace what was lost.

Where to go? What to do?

Relatives could help for a little while but Hassan and his family needed a place to stay permanently, not just a stopgap. Where they landed is Sadr City, a huge, Shiite slum on Baghdad's east side.

There, the family was able to get a small, old house — just two Dickensian rooms.

It's cold and damp. In the living room, there are two carpets, a refrigerator that a relative donated to the family, and three pictures of Imam Ali — another Shiite saint — hung on the cement walls. There is no other furniture in the room, not even a chair. The window is broken, covered with wooden board.

If anything, their plight gets more difficult.

Forty-year-old Hassan and his wife, Amal Jassim, now have six mouths to feed. In addition to their four older children, now ages 3 to 8, the couple last October welcomed the twins — a boy and a girl named Hassan and Zainab. Each suffers from tuberculosis.

There is no heating source in the house, and Hassan cannot afford to buy kerosene to fuel the stove.

The babies' medical care is draining the family budget, as is electricity — in the form of their contribution to a neighborhood generator.

"I depend heavily on the charity of people and organization to ensure the survival of my family," said Hassan, who has received aid from a group that roughly translates as the Supporters of Rightness Charity Association. Formed in 2006, it provides aid to about 125 families, relying on to donations to give them money, food, blankets, clothes and simple furniture.

"We always hear about generous help by the government to displaced people in the state media, but I got nothing so far," said Hassan, though he also concedes he hasn't tried, feeling it would be a futile effort.

Hassan has sacrificed his own health to help the children. He's diabetic, and has to eat something before he injects himself with insulin. But some nights there is only enough food for the kids, so he skips dinner and his shot.

Sometimes there's no dinner for the older kids, and so they eat the only food available — donated baby formula.

Ali Mouhan's family also goes to bed hungry.

Mouhan, his wife and their five children were forced out of Sunni Abu Ghraib area in 2006. As the family was leaving, gunmen opened fire on their car, killing the Shiite couple's 9-year old daughter.

They, too, wound up in Sadr City. Dinner is often nonexistent these days, and lunch is only fried tomato and bread. Mouhan is jobless; his wife works as a police officer.

"Life has become very difficult for us since we left our house," Mouhan said. "We have been turned into beggars."

Like Hassan, Mouhan suffers from a life-threatening disease — his is cancer. He used to receive chemotherapy, but now doctors say that his case is too advanced to make it worthwhile.

The couple's two surviving girls go to school but their two boys stay home. Girls are less demanding, and spend less money when they are out of the house, he said. But 10-year-old Zainab complains she has no toys.

"I miss my teddy bear that I left in Abu Ghraib," she said.