MRS > Office of Refugee Programs
By Paul Jeffrey
www.catholicnews.com
November 25, 2008
DAMASCUS, Syria (CNS) -- Milad Kaktoma is an accomplished violinist and was a rising star in Iraq until he fled the violence last year to live as a refugee in neighboring Syria.
Now Kaktoma plays his violin once a week at a nearby Chaldean Catholic Church packed with Iraqi refugees seeking solace in their faith. The 24-year-old spends his other days practicing his music in front of a mirror in his sisters' bedroom; like many refugees he is fearful of wandering far from the safety of the family's crowded apartment.
"He only plays sad songs these days," his father, Basil Kaktoma, told Catholic News Service.
Another Iraqi refugee in Damascus spends his day making people laugh.
Rahman Aidi Mashoof is a clown. In Baghdad he belonged to a clown troupe, the Happy Family Team for Childhood Peace, but after repeated threats and the assassination of two colleagues in 2007, the rest of the group fled. Three clowns went to Cairo, Egypt, and Mashoof and two others came to Syria.
Soon they found work with the U.N. refugee agency, and several days a week they entertain children while parents sit for hours in a cavernous warehouse waiting for interviews.
"We want to save a generation, so we tell the children they have to go to school. We want the children to have a new future, because when they came here they brought with them many bad memories of the war. We have to clear those memories from their minds, and there is no better way to do that than with laughter," Mashoof told CNS.
Whether they spend their days making sad music or making children laugh, most Iraqi refugees here say they have little interest in returning to their fractured homeland. Even though the Iraqi Embassy promises prospective returnees that they will receive cash grants to pay for travel and other expenses, as well as assistance from the Iraqi security services in recovering their abandoned homes, most are not buying it.
"If you go back, the army will chase the other family out of your house. But the next day, when the army is gone, they'll (family members) come back and kill you," said Mohanned Abdul Ghani, who came to Syria in 2006.
Ghani and his wife have three daughters. One has resettled in Sweden, one in Virginia, and one, a 20-year-old, is studying at the Dominican University of California, under the Iraqi Student Project, a program that brings Iraqi young people to the United States for university studies.
Another refugee in Damascus said Iraqis cannot even trust their own army.
"They come wearing uniforms to your house, and you don't know if they are police or army or someone else. But because they have guns, they can do what they want," said Dyaa Abbas, who fled Iraq in 2006. "We're afraid of the soldiers and police. You can't live in a country where you're afraid of your own government."
Abbas and his wife, Sawsan Hussin, are both pharmacists, and they lived a comfortable life in Baghdad. Yet as the violence swept into their neighborhood, Abbas was kidnapped and beaten by one militia group. Neighbors on each side were killed; his pharmacy was looted.
"We finally decided it was time to leave when the children came home from school and talked about the bodies they saw on the way home," he said.
At first they lived off their savings and the income from a pharmacy that Hussin owned back in Baghdad, but their savings has run out, and Hussin's pharmacy was destroyed in September. Now they are scraping by with help from relatives in Finland and dreaming of resettlement elsewhere -- anywhere but back home.
The couple is skeptical of news reports that claim conditions have improved in Iraq. They exchange e-mails daily with friends in Baghdad who report continuing problems with sewage, electricity, health care and violence.
"I want to raise my children in peace. How can I do that in Iraq?" asked Abbas.
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