Stranded Americans Share Refugee Life : Gulf: U.S. authorities work to get residents out of Iraqi border camps. But there are complications.

Only last fall, she was a waitress at Spire’s Restaurant in Anaheim. Her son was a student at Salk Elementary School. Her daughter was just starting the eighth grade.

Now, Randa Ali and her family are living in a crowded tent fashioned of strung-together blankets on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, refugees from a war they hadn’t planned to attend.

Ali, 32, who asked that her family’s full true names not be used because of potential reprisals, spends her days chain-smoking cigarettes on a cushion on the desert sand, waiting for deliverance from the hell the family now calls home. Her daughter sits and cries in a corner of the tent.

From all directions come the shouts and wails of children and their mothers, scrambling for food, water and a measure of peace in the 105-degree spring heat that is smothering the Abdali refugee camp.

“This is not Disneyland,” Ali said quietly. “We’ve been here 22 days now, and we’ve lost it, we’ve really lost it. I don’t think we can stand it much more.”

Of the 20,000 refugees stranded in two camps in southern Iraq, at least three are American passport-holders, and several others hold green cards entitling them to live and work in the United States.

“They told us we can go back to the U.S., but it will be another month,” said Dhia Doori, a physician and American passport-holder whose mother lives in Davis, Calif. “I was floored. Another month? Here?”

U.S. officials say they have worked to speed the removal of U.S. citizens from the crowded camps but have been delayed by requests that the Americans’ families, many of whom do not hold American passports, accompany them.

“They all end up being complicated, because there are non-American family members who don’t qualify for entry immediately through the petition process,” explained one diplomat. “We’re working on all of those to try to sort them out.”

Ali and her husband, both Iraqi-born, had been living in Southern California for eight years on alien registration cards when they decided last September to take a vacation to visit family members they hadn’t seen in years in Jordan, then Iraq.

When they arrived in Baghdad, their passports were confiscated, and Ali’s husband, an Anaheim interior decorator, was arrested for having illegally left the country.

Terrified, they remained in Iraq throughout the war and eventually made their way to the camp at Safwan.

Doori was born in the United States to an American mother and Iraqi father and attended an American college, but she had been practicing medicine in Baghdad for several years when the war broke out.

Once U.S. forces were occupying southern Iraq, the Dooris set out with their three young children, weaving their way through Iraqi lines, bribing people for gasoline. At checkpoints, when asked by Iraqi soldiers where they were going, the husband would lie and say the family was visiting friends in a nearby city up the road.

Twelve hours after they set out from Baghdad, the first American checkpoint became visible ahead, and the soldiers at the last Iraqi checkpoint warned Doori to stay away from the Americans.

“We told them we had to buy gas from them, and it was enough. When we saw those American forces, I can’t tell you how we felt.”

The husband now spends his days lugging water containers back to the family’s makeshift tent and providing medical treatment for other residents at the camp.

“It’s terrible here,” he said. “The heat is bad--bad. The sand gets into everything.” Completing the paperwork to take his family with him to the United States will take another month, he said. “But at least there’s hope.”

Ali and her family have received approval to return to the United States but cannot find a way to get there. There are no direct flights from Kuwait or Bahrain, and the Saudis will not give the family transit visas to take a flight from Dhahran or Riyadh.

So in the meantime, they wait in Safwan.

“The kids are the hard part,” Ali said, pointing to her weeping daughter. “They said, ‘Mom, we’re upset. We don’t want to go to Iraq no more.’ Well, neither do I.”