Iraqis stepping off buses
returning from Syria, having fled there to seek refuge from bloodshed in their
homeland, told of being forced to leave because of escalating unrest and
threats.
Hundreds of men, women, and
children descended from dozens of buses in the Mansur neighborhoods of west
Baghdad, clinging to hastily packed luggage and looking for relatives awaiting
their arrival.
"The situation there
is so bad," said Khalid al-Jawadi, a 60-year-old retired teacher from
Baghdad.
"There is fighting,
gunfire -- it is a war there, everywhere. We escaped because we were very
afraid of dying."
Standing near his wife and
four children, Jawadi added: "I will never, ever, return to Syria."
The government has called
on its citizens to return to Iraq to flee the violence in Syria, and has
provided flights for Iraqis in Damascus, while dozens of buses shuttle back and
forth daily.
It is a cruel irony that
most of those returning to Iraq fled the country several years ago for the same
reason they are now leaving Syria—worsening violence and attacks.
A woman who gave her name
only as Umm Omar—mother of Omar—told AFP: "The tensions, the protests, the
violence made our old fears return to us, so I told [my husband] that we should
return as soon as we can to Baghdad."
Standing alongside her, her
husband Abu Omar, father of Omar, said one of his relatives, a 20-year-old man,
was shot dead by gunmen.
Officials in the western
Iraqi desert province of Anbar, which shares a long border with Syria, said on
Thursday that thousands of families had crossed into Iraq to escape the
violence in Syria.
Government spokesperson Ali
Dabbagh told AFP on Thursday that Baghdad estimated there were between 100,000
and 200,000 Iraqis still in Syria, but that the authorities had no specific
numbers.
Umm Zainab, a 41-year-old
former resident of the Shiite shrine city of Najaf in central Iraq, told AFP
she and her family were threatened by bearded gunmen early in the morning
several days ago who told them to leave the country.
"I escaped with small
bags with my husband and my 13-year-old daughter -- we went straight to the bus
station to return to Baghdad," she said.
One bus driver, a Syrian
who refused to give his name for fear of retribution, described seeing hundreds
of Iraqis over the past two days take buses from areas in and around Damascus
to Baghdad.
The distance by road
between the two capitals is around 850 kilometers.
"Most Iraqis decided
to return to Baghdad, especially after the attack where the defense minister
was killed," he said, referring to Wednesday's bombing in Damascus that
killed four top security officials.
"Hundreds of others
are waiting to return."
But the country they are
returning to, while markedly safer than during the communal bloodshed of
2006-2008, remains one where basic services such as clean water and electricity
remain lacking, a fact of which many Iraqis stepping off buses in Baghdad were
unaware.
"How is the
electricity?" asked Umm Saif, who lived in Damascus for seven years but
returned with her daughter on Friday. Iraqis get six to eight hours of national
grid electricity at most in the boiling summer.
"Is it really good
like we have heard? Or are there still power cuts?"
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