Saturday, August 25, 2007

Twice or thrice displaced Palestinians, still without a home.

Robert S. Eshelman has pointed out that as many as several hundred Palestinians have been forced to flee Iraq because of the war there, forcing them to arrive back home with no place to stay. Currently they are in a refugee camp. Whereas they have lived for many years in Iraq, apparently rather comfortably, now they are living in tents. Those in one camp survive only because aid organizations are providing them with water, pre-cooked meals, and other supplies. But a larger camp seems to be getting no support whatever. The Palestinian refugees from Iraq “have no nation to return to,” he says. There was a period when Iraq was a place for displaced Palestinians to flee to, but now that the Shia of Iraq have become militant they have been threatening the Palestinians, accusing them of being Wahhabis, even takfiris [refers to an extremist Islam embraced by Al Qaeda, not as Eshelman says, unbelievers], and forcing them out.
Click on the title for the whole article.

1 comment:

Sami said...

This new (Iraqi) Palestinian refugee problem has only worsened in the years since the U.S. invasion, when Iraqis themselves began to turn on them:

Iraqis evict Palestinian refugees [May 2003]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3015739.stm

Iraq Palestinians taste bitter exile [May 2007]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6698503.stm



This tragic continuous displacement of Palestinian refugees from Iraq is complicated further by an unwillingness on part of several neighboring Arab states to accommodate these people within their borders:

Brazil to resettle Palestinian refugees who fled Iraq [June 2007]
http://yp.entertainment.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070621-1204-brazil-refugees.html