The uncerTainTies involved in calculaTing migraTion 199
and stabilising Iraq – two goals introduced a posteriori as justif ications for
the war activities. The liberal idea of ‘peace-building’ based on a cycle of
democratisation, free-market transformation and social pacif ication, with
all three processes reinforcing each other, failed miserably. What happened
in Iraq cannot be whitewashed by conjuring up the paradigm of some
well-intended ‘liberal imperialism’.
Rather, the occupied country disintegrated into civil-war-like conf licts
between the three major zones divided by ethnic and religious differences:
the region in the north dominated by the Kurds, organised like a largely
autonomous substate; the areas under Shiite control in the south, home to
armed militias funded by Shiite Iran, actively f ighting the occupying forces
as well as both Sunni and Christian minorities; and the so-called Sunnite
Triangle, where the remaining forces of Sunni rule from the time of Saddam
Hussein and his elite troops (with the help of Arab Jihadists) have set up
well-organised and violent resistance. The main enemies – besides the
occupying forces – have been those not belonging to the respective ethnic
or confessional group. According to the information gathered by the Society
for Threatened Peoples, the ‘greatest persecution of Christians today’ is
taking place in Iraq, and its victims are migrating, and will continue to
migrate, above all, to Europe.
The presence of some 130,000 troops from the US and other NATO
countries was only partially able to stem the development of these events
bordering on civil war. What it could not stop was the disintegration of
the former autocratic political system. The result, according to UNHCR
data, was the f light of over 1.5 million refugees to Syria, around 750,000
to Jordan, some 200,000 to the other Gulf states, 100,000 to Egypt and
40,000 to Lebanon, where they still live today under more-than-precarious
circumstances. The UN Economic and Social Commission for Western
Asia (ESCWA) has warned that Syria and Jordan might collapse under
the burden of the Iraqi refugees, who are straining their housing markets,
infrastructure, and health and educational facilities – not the least because
the countries that instigated the war have offered very little help and taken
in only a few refugees (Zorob 2007).
The civil war in Syria dramatically aggravated the situation of the refugees
from Iraq and forced hundreds of thousands of them either to f lee – along
with Syrians – to the refugee camps set up in neighbouring countries or
else to return to Iraq, where they had lost everything and could not hope
for a safe life – a human tragedy, which was not given much attention in
the Western media. The refugees from Iraq were trapped, and only a small
number of them were allowed into the EU. The Union took a much more