Why the Surge is Not a Success

Violence is down and the Republicans are aching to declare victory. But the result of our strategy in Iraq over the past years is still a disaster when the condition of Iraqi refugees is considered. Today’s Washington Post discusses the plight of returning Iraqis:

When the Iraqi government last month invited home the 1.4 million refugees who had fled this war-ravaged country for Syria -- and said it would send buses to pick them up -- the United Nations and the U.S. military reacted with horror.

U.N. refugee officials immediately advised against the move, saying any new arrivals risked homelessness, unemployment and deprivation in a place still struggling to take care of the people already here. For the military, the prospect of refugees returning to reclaim houses long since occupied by others, particularly in Baghdad, threatened to destroy fragile security improvements.

"It's a problem that everybody can grasp," said a senior U.S. diplomat here. "You move back to the house that you left and find that somebody else has moved into the house, maybe because they've been displaced from someplace else. And it's even more difficult than that, because in many cases the local militias . . . have seized control and threw out anybody in that neighborhood they didn't like."

The vast population upheaval resulting from Iraq's sectarian conflict has left the country with yet another looming crisis. At least one of every six Iraqis -- about 4.5 million people -- has left home, some for other parts of Iraq, others for neighboring nations.

The thorny issues were evident when the first and so far only group of families was bused back from Syria by the Iraqi government on Nov. 28. According to the United Nations, only about a third of the 30 families returned to their original homes. Most of the rest, finding a new sectarian makeup in their neighborhood or their property pillaged, moved in with already overburdened relatives in other parts of the Baghdad area.
For many Iraqis, the homes they left no longer exist. Houses have been looted, destroyed or occupied. Most Baghdad neighborhoods, where Shiites and Sunnis once lived side by side, have been transformed into religiously homogeneous bastions where members of the other sect dare not tread.

U.S. military commanders and diplomats here acknowledge that the recent decline in violence is the result, in part, of the city's segregation. There are now far fewer mixed neighborhoods where religious militias can target members of the other sect.

In most of Baghdad, the population shift has been at the expense of Sunnis, many of whose former neighborhoods are newly populated by poorer Shiite migrants under militia protection and, often, control. Groups such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia "are no longer just thugs who are carrying guns around on the street," the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the issue. "They've kind of supplanted local government, with streams of revenue -- rent from housing they've taken over, protection money from businesses," and control of fuel and electricity supplies.

The number of Iraqis returning under their own steam is still a relative trickle. The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that 25,000 have come back from Syria since September, while the Iraqi government puts the combined total in recent months at 60,000 from Syria and Jordan, where the Iraqi refugee population totals about 700,000.
Recent surveys conducted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees paint an increasingly dire picture of refugee life. In Syria, a third of Iraqi refugees said their resources will last for less than three more months. With new Syrian visa requirements and restrictions on services, nearly half said their children have dropped out of school.