Refugees

Violence is significantly lower these days in Iraq, and the Americans who still keep the peace there are busy planning for a significant troop withdrawal over the next 18 months. But that country's hopes for a brighter economic future are shadowed by the loss of more than 2 million refugees - many of them doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers - who have fled to Jordan, Syria and other neighboring countries. Most of these displaced people are afraid to return to Iraq, which they believe remains unsafe.

JARAMANA, Syria - Hasem Abed is thinking about going back to Iraq. The small-time auto trader, 32, left Diyala earlier this year after members of a Shia militia destroyed his house. He says this town outside Damascus has been more secure, but he has run out of money and has been unable to find work. He is thinking of trying his luck in Baghdad. Hassam Abdul Rahman might join him. Life in Iraq, the 42-year-old mechanical engineer says, "is very bad." But he, too, has exhausted his savings in Syria.

It's not that Muhammad Shumri imagined building a new life in Baltimore would be easy. But he didn't expect it to be so hard. The 48-year-old physician was a high-ranking official in the Iraqi Ministry of Health when a photograph that placed him at a meeting with U.S. officials was stolen from his computer. Soon he was receiving anonymous threats warning him to stop working with the Americans. He moved his wife and five children out of Iraq, traveled alone to the United States and requested asylum.

DAMASCUS, Syria - Adnan al-Sharafy sees a few obstacles holding up the return of Iraqi refugees to their home country: the U.S. military, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the news media. Sharify, an official at the Iraqi Embassy here in Syria, helped to organize government-sponsored bus trips at the end of last year that he says carried 420 Iraqi families back to Baghdad. (The United Nations estimates the Iraqi population here at 1.2 million.) More free rides home are planned, Sharify says.

DOUMA, Syria - Second of three parts Mustafa Hamad Rassoul doesn't see how his family can survive. Back in Baghdad, the 55-year-old Iraqi Kurd says, the money he made running a clothing shop was more than enough to house and feed his two wives and 10 children. But here in Syria, where he came last year after being threatened by the Mahdi Army, the food and cash assistance his family receives doesn't last the month. Rassoul blames the United States. "America always talks about human rights," he says while waiting at the U.N. refugee registration center in this city outside Damascus.

DAMASCUS, Syria - These refugees aren't in camps. And that's making it more difficult for aid workers to address their growing needs. The great majority of Iraqis who have come to Syria have settled in and around the capital. Most have disappeared into the cosmopolitan population of this Middle Eastern hub; many are intentionally keeping their profiles low, for fear of being caught, detained, and sent back to Iraq. The pattern is the same in Jordan, Lebanon and other Iraqi neighbors. "It's completely different from a camp situation," says Imran Riza, who represents the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan.

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.

BEIJING - Just when it seemed that nothing good could pierce the gloomy, gray haze that stifles this city, just when the U.S. Olympic Committee set the bar of foolishness and political expediency higher than any gold medalist will ever jump, a story comes along to remind the world that the Olympics still have great redemptive power. The captains of the U.S. teams participating in the Beijing Games yesterday chose 1,500-meter runner Lopez Lomong, a Sudanese refugee who was abducted from his church at age 6 and targeted for a life as a child soldier, to carry the American flag into the opening ceremony tomorrow.

St. Mary's City -- Nezia Munezero and her 10-member family spent years running from one East African refugee camp to another, staying one step ahead of death in a world torn by ethnic warfare and genocide. In 2002, they were resettled in Baltimore. At age 16 and with no knowledge of English, she enrolled at the now-shuttered Southwestern High School and lived in a grim neighborhood beset by urban crime. It was a stepping-stone to a better life, but also another place to flee. "Students at Southwestern weren't friendly toward immigrants," said Munezero, 22, a slight woman with a lilting accent.

WASHINGTON -- The United States remains on track to accept 12,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of September, despite having fallen sharply behind the pace needed to meet that resettlement pledge, administration officials said yesterday. The Bush administration fell well short of last year's target of admitting 7,000 Iraqis and has resettled fewer than 3,000 in the first half of the current fiscal year. But Ambassador James Foley, the top State Department official on Iraqi refugees, said the government is now able to process many more candidates for admission.