Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Where Can Iraqis Go?

Iraqi refugees are running out of places to flee to. The people who helped the U.S. military should definitely be given refuge here. The U.S. led war has made life dangerous for Christians and anyone who helped the U.S. DP

As millions of refugees try to escape war and violence...

By Rebecca Webber

IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, insurgent militias in Iraq have targeted specific citizens because of their religion or ethnicity—or because of their association with Americans. One such threatened Iraqi was Rafi, 27, a Baghdad engineer who had assisted the U.S. military with setting up phone networks.

"As a Christian who helped the U.S., I was dead," he says. "They told my father, 'Give us your son, or we're going to burn all of you.'" In early 2007, after one of his neighbors was kidnapped and killed and he was threatened with the same fate, Rafi and his family left for Syria in the middle of the night.

They joined more than 4 million other Iraqis—about one in six of the country's pre-war population—who have fled, creating the biggest refugee crisis of the past decade. More than half of the refugees moved to safer areas within Iraq; a small number of those people live in makeshift camps. Two million Iraqis have left the country entirely. About 1.2 million are in Syria, half a million are in Jordan, and tens of thousands have ended up in Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey, according to the most recent numbers from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.

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