U.S. Asylum Remains Elusive for Iraqis
By LEE KEATH
Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt ? Desperate Iraqis here and in Jordan are slogging through a slow, grueling process of interviews and background checks, trying to get one of the thousands of slots the United States is giving out to Iraqis for permanent asylum.
When the U.S. announced it would start taking in more Iraqi refugees earlier this year, some were hoping for what amounted to an airlift to America.
What they have seen instead is a slow dribble, though it is speeding up. The head of the State Department's refugee office, Ellen Sauerbrey, said recently that 400 Iraqis had entered the U.S. over the past month ? a big jump over the 190 who made it in the rest of the year before August.
Overall, though, the sluggish process has left refugees confused and angry ? particularly those who risked their lives working for the Americans in Iraq and now feel abandoned by the U.S. at their time of need.
"I jeopardized my life every day to get low-fat yoghurt for Americans. And I was a target," said Ihab Rifaat, who was a supply manager for USAID in Baghdad ? but had to flee the country after repeated death threats from militants.
Now he is in Cairo ? where he has been tortured by police in the past ? waiting for months for word whether he will get to the U.S.
"Is that fair?" he said of the long process. "I can never go back to Iraq. It's like I have a tattoo on me that says, 'Worked for U.S.'"
Washington initially announced in early 2007 that it would look at the cases of 7,000 Iraqis, all earmarked by the U.N. as eligible to be refugees, by the end of this September. It later set a more modest goal of letting in 2,000 by the end of September.
It likely won't even reach that number. Paul Rosenzweig, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, says he expects 1,725 admissions by Sept. 30.
But Rosenzweig says the system is speeding up as more Iraqis get through the interview stages of the process and start getting acceptances.
He said he expected 2,400 Iraqis to be admitted to the U.S. in the last three months of 2007, with a similar number each quarter after that.
"It's coming in more rapidly. Once the train gets going, that's what we expect to be doing each quarter," he told The Associated Press.
More than 2 million Iraqis have fled their homeland to escape the chaos that has torn the country apart since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and ouster of Saddam Hussein.
They have swamped Jordan and Syria, which are struggling to provide them services. And the refugees themselves are living in limbo, most unable to work and running out of whatever money they were able to bring out of Iraq.
The United States has already come under criticism for not promising to take more. Last month, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari called the U.S. intention to consider 7,000 "symbolic," saying it was only a drop in the bucket of the total refugee problem.
The road to the U.S. is a long one. Iraqis must first apply to the UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency ? their first round of interviews.
Those who are eligible for the United States then go through a second round of interviews with the U.N. migratory agency to prepare their cases.
Finally, they are interviewed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which decides which Iraqis to accept for resettlement in America.
Once accepted in principle by the DHS, however, they must then undergo security and medical checks that can take weeks longer.
DHS officials are expected to have completed more than 5,000 interviews by the end of September, and will do another 4,300 in the last three months of this year, Rosenzweig said.
So far U.S. officials have not been able to conduct interviews in Syria ? home to more than 1 million refugees ? because Damascus has refused entry visas to DHS officials, he said.
Not just those who worked for the U.S. in Iraq are seeking resettlement. Some fled the relentless sectarian violence that has torn Iraq apart.
Umm Adwar, a Christian Iraqi widow who has been in Amman for the past year, has had her medical check and is still waiting for word on when she will go to the U.S., where she has distant relatives.
"Every day that passes, I grow even more anxious and impatient to hear the good news," she said.
Umm Adwar, 56, fled Iraq after her husband's liquor store in Baghdad was blown up by Islamic militants, and her daughter was injured by a bomb attack on their church.
She now lives in an unfurnished apartment in the Jordanian capital with her daughter and three sons, their savings nearly depleted. Her husband died of health reasons soon before they fled Iraq.
In Cairo, Rifaat went through his DHS interview in early August. The waiting room was packed with Iraqis and their families ? alongside refugees from Sudan and other African countries.
"They took like two hours with each one, some people it even took four hours," he said of the interview process. "There were people coming out crying, some people coming out angry."
Rifaat, a fluent English speaker, said he eagerly joined USAID after Saddam's 2003 fall. He quickly rose up to a managerial position ? but then had to quit after threats from Sunni insurgents.
He moved between several jobs with U.S. companies ? including one with a contractor that oversaw security in the Green Zone, Baghdad's most heavily protected neighborhood and home to U.S. and Iraqi government offices.
Though he lived with threats for years, Rifaat finally decided it was time to flee the country when he received a written warning from Shiite militiamen that he was to be killed.
He paid a smuggler to get him to Sweden but instead, after weeks bouncing between India and Syria en route, he ended up in Egypt.
There, he was arrested for using the fake passport given to him by the smugglers and held for several weeks, during which Rifaat says he was beaten.
Now Rifaat is cautiously optimistic he will make it to the U.S. ? but he's frustrated that those who worked for the Americans have to endure the wait.
He points to Denmark, which over a matter of weeks in July evacuated 200 Iraqis who had worked for its military in the southern city of Basra. The 200 are now in Denmark and are expected to receive asylum.
"Why would the Danish government have more American values than the American government?" he said. The Danes "assumed that if (the Iraqis) have been working for us and we trusted them, then we should trust them to enter our country."
Kirk Johnson, a former USAID official who worked with Rifaat in Baghdad, is now pressing for the U.S to move faster to help those who helped the United States in Iraq.
Johnson has prepared a list of more than 500 Iraqis who were employed by the U.S. military or government in Iraq and now seek resettlement in America. He has provided the list, along with documentation, to the State Department, with updates every month as he finds more.
So far, he said, only five have been accepted in principle, and only two of those have made it to the U.S. yet.
"I look at this as an absolute lack of progress in the past eight months," he said. "The system is not functioning. It's because of a lack of political will."
But the process for Iraqis is the same that refugees from other nations must go through to get to the United States, a process which Rosenzweig said is necessary to keep out those who could represent a security threat.
"I think it would be utterly irresponsible to short-circuit the process," to give a shortcut to some Iraqis, he said.
Still, he said, DHS has made getting entry for Iraqis a priority, diverting staff who would normally be processing refugees in equally desperate straits from other trouble spots like Sudan's Darfur region.
"We have made this go more quickly (for Iraqis) than it does for most refugees, while not diminishing our vigilance about security," he said.
"We are working flat out on this."
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