Casualties of The Iraq War - Iraqi Refugees Crisis

Iraqi Refugees Crisis

As of November 4, 2006, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 1.8 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 1.6 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month.

As of 2007 more Iraqis had lost their homes and become refugees than the population of any other country. Over 3.9 million people, close to 16 percent of the Iraqi population, have become uprooted. Of these, around 2 million have fled Iraq and flooded other countries, and 1.9 million are estimated to be refugees inside Iraq.

Roughly 40 percent of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled, the U.N. said. Most are fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return. All kinds of people, from university professors to bakers, have been targeted by militias, Iraqi insurgents and criminals. An estimated 331 school teachers were slain in the first four months of 2006, according to Human Rights Watch, and at least 2,000 Iraqi doctors have been killed and 250 kidnapped since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Project Censored cites the large number of Iraqi refugees as additional support of their argument that the number of Iraqi casualties is much larger than generally addressed in the mainstream media.

A May 25, 2007, article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer noted that in the past seven months only 69 people from Iraq had been granted refugee status in the U.S. As a result of growing international pressure, on June 1, 2007, the Bush administration said it was ready to admit 7,000 Iraqi refugees who had helped the coalition since the invasion. According to Washington, D.C.-based Refugees International, the U.S. has admitted fewer than 800 Iraqi refugees since the invasion, Sweden had accepted 18,000, and Australia had resettled almost 6,000.