History
The birth of the Palestinian community in modern Iraq dates back to 1948, when the Iraqi army, which had been fighting in Palestine, returned to Baghdad with a group of Palestinians who had been forced to flee their homes in Haifa and Jaffa. Following the 1967 War with Israel, a second larger wave of Palestinians sought refuge in Iraq. The third and final wave occurred in 1991 after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when those Palestinians living in Kuwait and other Gulf states fled or were expelled due to (what the Gulf States alleged to be) Yasser Arafat’s support for the invasion. In fact Yasser Arafat was never supportive of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. His opposition to the war against Iraq in 1991 was driven by his principle opposition to US attacks against Arab countries. Over the years, there were also many Palestinians who came to Iraq in search of work. Prior to 2003, there were approximately 25,000 registered Palestinian refugees living in Iraq. In December 2010, approximately 10,000 Palestinians remained in Iraq, the majority of whom were living in and around Baghdad.
Read more about this topic: Palestinians In Iraq
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)