To: Elroy who wrote (315052 ) 12/15/2006 2:39:02 PM From: tejek Read Replies (2) | Respond to 1.8 million have fled the country? If that is so, wouldn't there be huge refugee camps somewhere holding these people? At least Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran would suddenly have a huge illegal alien problem. "Some three hundred thousand Iraqis were said to be living in Jordan before the war. In downtown Amman, there is a neighborhood known as Little Iraq, a few streets where exiles gather in cafés to play cards and smoke water pipes, and where information is traded—rumors of refugee status being granted, whispers of fake passports available for a price. I had met many people like Ali there in early March, illegal immigrants fleeing poverty or arrest, living on the margins of Jordanian society. At a tiny café on the ground floor of a tenement building, decorated with images of Shia saints on one wall and a poster of Charlie Chaplin on another, I sat with a group of Iraqis who were smoking and drinking sweet tea. They were reluctant to give their names. Some had been petty traders in Iraq, others were the splinters of a shattered middle class. They were tired, they said. Life in Jordan was awful. One of them, a former agricultural engineer, said that his brother had been a Fulbright scholar and was now a professor of genetics in the United States. I listened to long harangues on the evils of the Bush administration. America would be defeated, I was told, and Bush was only after Iraq’s oil."72.14.253.104
