History
Iraqis have been present in Lebanon for decades, with many young Iraqi workers choosing to emigrate there to the Paris of the Middle East to further their careers. However, the first real influx of a large number of Iraqis to Lebanon started in earnest in the 1990s, with Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein's regime as well as the hardships of international sanctions. Most of the Iraqis during this period were Shia, fleeing Saddam’s regime, or Christians, seeking exile in an Arab country with a significant local Christian population. Human Rights Watch puts the pre-2003 number of Iraqis in Lebanon at about 10,000.
Read more about this topic: Iraqis In Lebanon
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)