IRAQ-JORDAN BORDER: In the barren, wind-swept plain between Jordan and Iraq, nearly 200 Iranian Kurds struggle to survive with little shelter and international help, holding out hope of resettlement in the West.
The U.N. relief agency has told the Kurds — half of them children — that their only option is to move to Kurdish-controlled parts of Iraq.
So far the Kurds have refused, remaining in this barren moonscape under a broiling sun in summer and bone-numbing cold in winter.
"We are refugees, but we are deprived of all refugee rights," said Ismail Karimi. "Aren't we human? Aren't our children human?"
Their plight began in January 2005 when hundreds of Iranian Kurds left a refugee camp near Ramadi after attacks by Sunni insurgents. They had lived in the camp since fleeing Iran soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution because of their opposition to the new regime.
The Kurds hoped to seek refuge in Jordan and eventually reunite with relatives in Europe and North America.
But the Jordanians refused to allow them to enter the country. And returning to the Ramadi area was too dangerous as violence in the area raged out of control.
More than 650 of the Kurds were eventually allowed to join families abroad.
But 194 of them remain here, unable to qualify for resettlement because their relatives abroad are not from their nuclear families.
Those left behind subsist in a makeshift settlement of cardboard and corrugated metal boxes, which serve as sleeping quarters and classrooms for the children, in the kilometer-wide (half-mile-wide) no man's land between Iraq and Jordan. With no sewage or water system, the inhabitants drink dirty brown water collected during the winter rains and stored in plastic containers.
Food comes mostly from the International Committee of the Red Cross and an Iranian-American relief organization, the Norooz Foundation of Charlotte, North Carolina, which is close to Farah Diba, widow of Iran's deposed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The Foundation also provides medicines and educational materials for the children.
Wires strung up through the camp siphon off electricity from across the Iraqi border to run a couple of TV sets — their only window to the outside world.
Foundation official Bahman Maalizadeh said despair is growing among the refugees.
"When I asked what I could bring, one woman told me, 'Please bring poison. I can't bear my life in this camp anymore. Our circumstances are brutal,'" Maalizadeh said during a visit to the camp last week.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has advised the refugees that they have no legal right to resettlement, either in Jordan or the West, and that they should go to Irbil, capital of the Kurdish self-governing region in northern Iraq, where they would be housed in a camp with UNHCR services.
"They have been advised over and over again that they should go to Irbil where we are able to help them," said Vandana Patel of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR.
But the Kurds have refused the offer, citing fear for their personal safety and don't want to stay in a camp. The Kurds belong to a small sect known as "Ahl-e-Haq," a religion that combines tenets of Islam with Iran's pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism, denounced by Islamic hardliners.
Members of the sect in northern Iraq were attacked by Islamic militants in 2001 and driven from their homes. Another minority sect, the Yazidis, was targeted Tuesday in northern Iraq by suicide bombers who killed at least 175 people and wounded 200 others, the Iraqi military said.
"We are not only victims of terrorism in Iraq and before that in Iran. We are also victims of the wrong politics of the UNHCR because we are living for three decades as refugees," said Khabat Mokhaabadi, 22, who was born in the camp near Ramadi.
Jordan has also refused to allow the Kurds to live in a more substantial refugee camp housing Palestinians just inside its side of the border.
All that is unsettling for family of Qumar Akhdar, a 2-year-old boy who suffers from a brain disorder.
Earlier this year, Qumar and his mother, Akhdar Ahmadi, were given permission to enter Jordan to see a specialist. The doctor recommended an operation but said the child would have to stay in the country for six months of recuperation.
The Jordanians are considering allowing Qumar in for the treatment.
"Qumar's getting worse since we returned," said Ahmadi. "I'm up with him all night long and giving him medicine but it seems to be of no use. His head is swelling more. Perhaps he's dying."
