Ghaith Abdul-Ahad in Baghdad
Wednesday March 21, 2007
The Guardian
An elderly Christian man, who had spent several hours waiting with his three daughters, had finally come face to face with an official, who studiously ignored him. "Can you write in the profession section that I was an English teacher?" he asked anxiously.
"There is no profession section in the new passport," replied the officer, without moving his eyes from the forms. "But if I apply for a visa to Australia how would they know that I am a teacher?" asked the man. "There are no professions," replied the officer.
"Don't worry haji," volunteered a young man in the queue by way of consolation, "no one is giving Iraqis visas."
Despite the truth in this black wisecrack, in the past four years hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have packed up their worldly goods, sold what they could not carry and fled to join a growing diaspora spread through neighbouring countries. As the violence has increased so has the desperation behind the thick blast walls that ring the passport office yard.
Each day the officials consider applications from a single Baghdad district; each day they issue just 100 forms. Anyone failing to get one has to wait a month until the neighbourhood comes up again. For those who do get a form, it is the start of a surreal obstacle course.
For a start, there are three different kinds of Iraqi passport. There are Saddam-era passports which the government initially said it would cancel, then decided to endorse, but which no other country, apart from Syria, recognises. Then there are the S series passports issued since the invasion. These are handwritten, easy to forge and no longer recognised by the EU, the UK or the US. Finally there is the Rolls-Royce of Iraqi passports, the G series, with digital numbers, watermarks and all the security features of the world's best.
"I have been working in the passport directorate for 15 years and this G passport is the best," said Abu Ahmad, an energetic official. "It's even better than the Jordanian one. You can carry one in your pocket and walk like a lord to any immigration official around the world."
When I met Abu Ahmad in a Baghdad hotel room, he was wearing jeans and carrying two mobile phones and a fat file of documents: ID cards, passports and pictures of half a dozen people. He explained that it took Iraqis six weeks to get a passport through official channels but less than a week through him. At a price, of course.
As Baghdad's civil war has escalated, business has boomed. Many have found themselves unable to reach the passport office where their names are registered. Ahmad, a Sunni, has made a lucrative business out of helping fellow Sunnis unwilling to venture into passport offices controlled by the Shia ministry of the interior.
"We help our brothers," he explained, breaking off repeatedly to take calls about passports. "By God, others charge $600 but I only take $500."
Despite his enthusiasm, few Iraqis who get their hands on even a G series passport expect to be treated like a lord as they arrive in a foreign country - they consider themselves lucky if they are allowed to enter at all.
At Amman airport recently, a dozen Iraqi families were sitting between their huge bags, some on the metal benches, some sleeping with their children on the floor. They had been denied entry and were waiting to be sent back. Other Iraqis approaching immigration avoided looking at them - it's a bad omen to exchange glances with the unfortunates.
Once an Iraqi gets his or her passport, their life becomes a succession of queues. They queue outside western embassies for visas, asylum, reunion, waving letters from relatives and university certificates. They queue outside the UNHCR for a document identifying them as refugees and granting them protection from deportations. They queue for everything.
In Damascus last month, about 20 men and women queued outside a small room at the entrance of Abraham's church in Jaramana. The church has become a centre for helping Iraqis. Food is distributed and temporary accommodation is sometimes available. But that day, no one knew why they were queuing. "They said it's for asylum seekers," said an old woman holding her family passports. "I heard it's for Australia, only the people who had relatives there," insisted another woman. "Just queue," said one young man, "do you have anything else to do?"
The nun later told me the church guard had not had any work to do so she had asked him to register the names of Iraqis in case more aid came.
In an alleyway behind the church I met Mona, a woman in her 30s. She was an engineer in the Dora refinery in Baghdad. She had left Iraq a couple of months earlier after Sunni insurgents threatened her, accusing her of collaborating with the Americans.
"Yes, Americans did come to the refinery, but what do I do? Tell them not to come?" She pulled her mobile out and showed me pictures of a desktop computer in an office. "See, I had such a nice computer in my office. They made me leave all this. I had $600 [£306] a month, now I'm here eating my savings and waiting. But even if I beg in the streets I am not going back to Iraq."
Not all Iraqis who have escaped did so with the help of a passport. A few weeks ago I met 23-year-old Imad and five of his friends in his flat in the eastern outskirts of Beirut. There was a table and two chairs, a TV and a DVD player; three mattresses were spread out in an alcove. "We gather here every Saturday night," he told me. "Someone cooks Iraqi food, others prepare a water pipe."
One man, Samir, played a DVD of Iraqi songs. Puffing the smoke of the water pipe and drinking cheap whisky mixed with mango juice they told me their stories. They were all Shias, mostly from Sadr City, and all in Lebanon illegally.
Immad had fled in 2004, travelling to Syria first and then crossing to Lebanon illegally. "The Lebanese won't give us visas, and it only costs $100 to cross," he said "I get $300 a month working here, and every three months I manage to send $100 to my family in Iraq."
Over the whisky, the talk is all about how to get into the EU: routes and prices are discussed, and phone numbers of smugglers are exchanged. "All I want is to reach Europe," Samir told me as he walked down the hill from the flat that night. "I don't care where, anywhere, I am not going back to Baghdad."
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