Returning home to uncertainty

A short woman with a worried look on her face walks down a dirt road toward her home, ignoring the throng of U.S. soldiers and fancily dressed dignitaries clogging the road.

They are here to trumpet the revival of this town northwest of Baghdad, which is witnessing the return of thousands of residents, among an estimated 4.2 million Iraqis who have fled sectarian violence in recent years. Ahlam Kareem is here to see what remains of her home, which she last saw 14 months ago.

Iraqi officials say tens of thousands of Iraqis are returning to their homes, drawn by improved security and financial aid packages offered by a government eager to bring its people back.

But the effort, which includes Iraqis returning from other countries and those who relocated within Iraq, is fraught with problems -- not least the specter of bombings such as the triple blasts that killed at least 41 people Wednesday in southern Iraq.

Some, like Kareem, a widow, are finding their homes looted, scorched and uninhabitable. Some, like Abu Ayad, a Shiite Muslim who brought his family back to the Sunni Muslim-dominated Ghazaliya neighborhood in Baghdad, are being driven out again by lingering sectarian tensions. In the latter case, neighbors say, someone tried to burn down his home days after the family’s return.

Many, like Zaher Salman, who returned to Saba al Bor from Syria early last month, came because they could not afford the higher cost of living elsewhere, or because their visas had expired. Salman laments he has no way to earn a living because he was robbed on the highway from Syria and lost everything, including the car he used for his taxi business.

“I’m staying here because I don’t have any money left,” he said. “I hope it will stay safe.”

People coming back are eligible for about 1 million Iraqi dinars, or roughly $800, and a monthly payout of about $120 for six months after their return.

But the country is struggling to revive schools, clinics and other essentials needed to care for a population traumatized by the past and edgy about the future.

So delicate is the situation that the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees issued a warning Nov. 23 about moving too quickly. The agency said it did not believe that Iraqi social services or security were adequate to handle the large-scale return of displaced people.

Government spokesman Ali Dabbagh played down such concerns. At a news conference late last month, he said nobody was being forced to come back and that the government was “doing its best” to protect those who did.

Determining how many people have returned is impossible, and skeptics accuse the government of exaggerating figures to make it appear that all is well in a still turbulent country. Dabbagh said that 60,000 people had returned from Syria alone in the last month. The Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration says that since October, an additional 10,000 Iraqi families displaced within the country have registered or are in the process of registering for benefits to return to their hometowns.

The numbers are a small fraction of the estimated 4.2 million people international organizations say have been uprooted since the start of the war in 2003, but they are enough to worry high-ranking U.S. military officials.

Army Col. Bill Rapp, a senior aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the U.S. mission in Iraq, said a concern to the military was how to handle the situation if returnees find squatters in their homes.

“The Iraqi government has not published a policy on what happens when your house is occupied by someone else,” Rapp said. “They want these guys to come back, but they haven’t yet figured out the mechanism for reestablishing people.”

He said U.S. forces had been “pleading” with the Iraqi government to come up with a policy so that American troops aren’t asked to sort out property disputes.

Saba al Bor offers myriad examples of the challenges of bringing Iraqis home.

Kareem, 55, reaches the end of the road, passes a small grove of trees and pushes open the broken metal door into her courtyard.

The once-comfortable house she shared with her two sons and their families is a shambles. The windowpanes are gone. The doors have been wrenched from their hinges. Dishes, lamps and anything else that could be broken lie in tiny pieces on the floor. Charred paint is peeling from the walls, ceiling and staircase. Only a refrigerator and a TV, shattered and partially melted from an arsonist’s attempt to burn down the house, are evidence that a family once lived here.

“There is nothing left. It is a total loss,” the Shiite woman said after her Nov. 17 visit to the house. “For now, I’m hopeless,” she added, explaining that 1 million dinars was not nearly enough to make the place habitable.

Kareem has gone back to Baghdad, where she had stayed with relatives since September 2006 after Sunni insurgents began threatening to kill Shiites who did not leave. Kareem, who fled with the rest of her family, came back after hearing that Saba al Bor was safe again. Then she saw her house.

On the eastern side of town, where Saba al Bor’s Sunni population lives, Talib Abid Karim, who returned Nov. 20, says she did not know she could apply for compensation. She looks at Usama Ali, a volunteer helping resettle people, and asks him to explain the program. Ali says even if she applied for the money she would not get it, because, he insists, only Shiite returnees are being compensated.

Later a U.S. soldier, Army Capt. Brooks Yarborough, dismissed Ali’s claim as “just a rumor.” But he acknowledged that it was a sign of the lingering distrust that must be overcome if Saba al Bor, which before the war was a relatively affluent community of about 73,000, is to once again become a thriving city.

Karim’s house is unscathed, but she is worried for the future. Her husband has no job, and her 12-year-old daughter bears ghastly scars on her stomach from the time she was caught in crossfire during the year they lived elsewhere. She fears that the girl has no chance of getting married if her scars cannot be treated.

But both Sunnis and Shiites, as well as U.S. troops, say there is nowhere close for Sunnis to go for serious medical problems. The nearest hospitals require traveling through areas still considered high-risk for Sunnis because of Shiite militia activities. Many Sunnis are too afraid to go even to the clinic across the city. Getting to a hospital in a Sunni city requires a circuitous route that would take about nine hours.

At a recent meeting in Saba al Bor’s newly refurbished government center, which doubles as a U.S.-Iraqi military post, two city leaders were trying to devise a system to ensure that returnees stay. They could fix problems such as broken doors and windows, but not broken trust.

Radhi Muhsin, the city manager, and Mohammed Abdullah, a resettlement volunteer, agreed that getting people to return is not the problem. It is making the city work again, and getting the Sunni and Shiite population to mix.

In the last two months, U.S. officials say, more than 20,000 people have streamed home to Saba al Bor, which had a mixed population before the war. Now, it’s mainly Shiite because many Sunnis are wary of returning to a place guarded by a police force that is nearly 100% Shiite, Abdullah and Muhsin said.

A mixed soccer team has been created to bring people together, but the city remains unofficially divided into the eastern Sunni section and the western Shiite section.

“It’s really a cease-fire at this point. It’s not reconciliation. They just stopped shooting each other,” said Army Capt. Timothy Dugan, with the 7th Cavalry, 1st Brigade Combat Team of the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division. The unit has been here since January and has seen the violence subside and the population surge back, but it has also seen how hard it will be to make Saba al Bor whole again.

Sunnis, and some Shiite residents, as well as U.S. forces in Saba al Bor, say a major problem is that Shiite-run government ministries in Baghdad neglect the needs of returning Sunnis.

On the Sunni side of town, for example, there is one school with six classrooms for 500 pupils. On the Shiite side, there are 11 functioning schools.

The Sunni school is overseen by two headmasters, one Sunni and one Shiite, who are old friends. They use their salaries to pay the seven volunteer teachers, because they say the ministry is dragging its feet hiring anyone to teach Sunni children.

“We don’t have enough teachers or doctors, but if you go to the Shiite sector, you’ll see it’s different,” said the Sunni headmaster, Ali Aziz Sultan.

“I’m a Shiite, and it’s easy for me to go down there to the clinic,” added his colleague, Moyed Hadie. “But it’s difficult for the Sunnis to go there.”

U.S. and Iraqi officials say such complaints are due more to fear and distrust than recognition of the current situation. “The problem is, people keep looking to the past. It is hard to make them look forward,” Muhsin said.

But most agree that given the past, it’s understandable.

“If I had lost my brother to Shiites, I’d be afraid to walk to the clinic on the other side of town too,” said Ali, the Sunni who accused the government of not paying compensation to returning Sunnis.

People who stayed through the war, like him, now see how much better things are, Ali said. “But people who just got here one week ago, it’s hard for them to cross to the other side.”

--

tina.susman@latimes.com

Times staff writers Peter Spiegel and Saad Khalaf in Baghdad contributed to this report.