AMMAN, Jordan - Najim Abid Hajwal thought he would be back in Baghdad by now.
The 49-year-old businessman fled Iraq after a worker in one of his factories warned that his name had appeared on a local hit list. He needed no convincing: By then, he says, two of his sons had narrowly escaped kidnappers, and a brother and a nephew had been shot to death.
Still, he expected the exile to be brief. Packing up his wife and their seven children, he imagined a sojourn lasting weeks.
That was four years ago.
While violence in Iraq has declined in 2008, kidnappers, car bombers and other killers continue to menace Baghdad. Hajwal, a Sunni Muslim, says his once-mixed neighborhood has been taken over by Shia Muslims. If he were to return home, he says, he would be killed.
"Every day, I'm waiting for things to improve, but I don't see it," Hajwal says in the apartment he rents with his family here in the Jordanian capital. "I feel as if, in one moment, I lost everything."
As the United States shifts its military focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, it leaves behind a humanitarian crisis. Since the 2003 invasion, more than 2 million Iraqis have fled the chaos of their homeland for the relative safety of Jordan, Syria and other neighbors. The greatest movement of people in the Middle East since the Palestinian flight of 1948 has impoverished hundreds of thousands of families, drained a crippled nation of its professional class and strained relations in an already volatile corner of the world.
It is an exodus that has occurred largely out of sight. Sixty years since the Palestinian flight transformed the Middle East, the region's governments have been reluctant to recognize this new wave of refugees. Iraqis, unable to live or work legally, arrive and disappear into the shadows of Amman and Damascus, Cairo and Beirut.
A fortunate few - under 23,000 in the past two years - have been resettled in Europe and North America. Two hundred and two have landed in Maryland, several of them congregating in and around an apartment complex in Northeast Baltimore.
An additional 110,000 have returned to Iraq to take their chances. But the great majority of them remain in exile, caught between a homeland most believe remains unsafe and countries where they fear detention and deportation.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees describes an unusually well-educated diaspora, one that includes doctors and nurses, teachers and engineers, now exhausting their savings while waiting for conditions to improve in Iraq or opportunities to resettle abroad.
