The forgotten

Just in case it looked like Iraq couldn't get any worse, the Star features a story covering the flow of destitute Iraqis into an overwhelmed Syria:

Abdelhamid El Ouali, the Damascus representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), says the plight of displaced Iraqis is deepening as they use up their meagre savings.

"We are beginning to see prostitution and child labour," he says. "But when nobody is turning the camera on the situation, nobody reacts. So, what we have is a silent exodus."

When Syria and Iraq are mentioned in the same sentence, the message almost always pertains to the flow of Iraq-bound militants that officials of the U.S.-led coalition cite as a continuing source of new insurgents.

But El Ouali estimates that the flow goes overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.

What's worse, some of the flow is due to explicit threats based on ethnicity...as some groups have apparently decided that ethnic cleansing is perfectly acceptable as long as they're the dominant group:

Raisan Musayer Abdullah, 43, was a lawyer in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk until the spring of 2004, when he came home to find a chilling message sprayed on his front door: "Leave now or we will kidnap your daughters."

A Sunni Arab, Abdullah says the warning came from Kurdish peshmerga militiamen determined to cleanse Arabs from the oil-rich city.

"They think every Arab was with Saddam and you cannot argue. All you can do is give up your house and go." Abdullah made for Damascus with his wife and five children.

As a result of next week's election, most of the news out of Iraq has involved attempts to prevent anybody from travelling from Syria to Iraq. As pointed out in the Star's article, that could have the effect of preventing some refugees from being able to renew their entry stampts to Syria, which puts them at added risk of abuse by Syrian authorities. And it doesn't look like even those who have a current entry stamp have any real hope of building lives for themselves in Syria.

It's bad enough that thousands of already-dead Iraqi civilians have apparently been considered acceptable collateral damage in the war. But it's all the worse that thousands more refugees can't even be counted (let alone taken care of) due to their apparent irrelevance to Bushco's vision for the Middle East. And it's utterly inexcusable that ethnic cleansing has now become an acceptable technique as long as it's a U.S. ally carrying out the process.

It's not yet too late for the wilful ignorance of both the ethnic cleansing and the plight of the refugees to change. But if they don't, the region will be all the more impoverished and all the less stable as a result.