A story I wrote appeared Mon­day in the Newark Star-Ledger, a great smaller paper that cares about for­eign news. The story dealt with the plight of the Iraqi refugees in Jordan.

Lives sus­pended by war
AMMAN, Jor­dan — Rana crosses her legs on the thread­bare car­pet in her liv­ing room in this poor Pales­tin­ian sec­tion of town and watches as her three chil­dren light a can­dle. The kids are hav­ing a pre­tend birth­day party with­out a cake or presents, but their faces are painted a mag­nif­i­cent shade of gold by the candlelight.

Across town, Hasa and his fam­ily sit in their richly-appointed apart­ment, with all the mod­ern con­ve­niences and bed­rooms for every­one. The kitchen is espe­cially bright and clean.

Rana and Hasa live in sep­a­rate worlds, but have much in common.

Both fam­i­lies are Iraqi refugees fac­ing an uncer­tain future in a for­eign coun­try. Both want to return to their shat­tered coun­try. And both agreed to be inter­viewed and pho­tographed for this story only if their real names would not be used because they fear depor­ta­tion from Jor­dan and ret­ri­bu­tion in Iraq.
Dri­ven from their homes by vio­lence and threats of death, Rana and Hasa also pro­vide rare por­traits of the refugee life fac­ing many Iraqis. The two fam­i­lies are among the 750,000 Iraqi refugees esti­mated to be liv­ing in Jor­dan, a coun­try about the size of Penn­syl­va­nia and chok­ing on the stag­ger­ing bur­den of its new pop­u­la­tion. (The Iraqis account for about 15 per­cent of the peo­ple liv­ing in Jordan.)

Rana’s fam­ily is strug­gling to fit in and faces dis­crim­i­na­tion from other Iraqis, Jor­da­ni­ans and Pales­tini­ans. Jor­da­ni­ans, Rana says, com­plain to her that “you’re not wear­ing a hijab, you’re wear­ing tight jeans, you’re leav­ing the house.” Pales­tini­ans, mean­while, say, “You killed Sad­dam.”
Hasa’s fam­ily, while well off, faces dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances as well. From their plush perch over­look­ing the local mosque, they made a com­fort­able life here after arriv­ing in 2003.

Things have changed, though.

Hasa now com­plains gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions make it impos­si­ble for him to run his busi­nesses here or in Iraq, and his life sav­ings is being bled dry.
At the same time, he rages at the U.S. government.

“We are in such a state that we who wel­comed Amer­ica now hate it, and hate the peo­ple as much as we hate the pol­i­tics,” he says. “This isn’t the free­dom we expected. This isn’t what we wanted.”

Two fam­i­lies in a coun­try where they don’t want to be.

Two fam­i­lies in a coun­try that really doesn’t want them. …

“Please read the whole thing”:http://www.nj.com/starledger/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1180932323248120.xml&coll=1. It should be noted that two days after the story appeared, the UNHCR raised the num­ber of Iraqis who are dis­placed or refugees to 4.4 mil­lion — almost twice the num­bers that were avail­able to me at the time of my report­ing. That’s 16 per­cent of the entire Iraqi pop­u­la­tion, mak­ing it the largest human cat­a­stro­phe to hit the Mid­dle East in recorded his­tory. It dwarfs the Pales­tin­ian dis­place­ments in 1948 and 1967. If some­thing isn’t done about this, it will fur­ther desta­bi­lize an already volatile region.

By the way, can some­one rec­om­mend a good server host? Yahoo! is ter­ri­ble and I keep get­ting 500 Server Errors pre­vent­ing me from get­ting into the blog, rebuild­ing it, etc.