The cause of Iraqi refugees, thousands of whom aided the U.S. military during the Iraq War in exchange for visas, was much in the news in the last 24 hours. There was this NPR story about Iraqi interpreters who are stuck in Iraq, waiting for the American bureaucracy to give them their due, meanwhile hiding out in their homes because militants would like to see them dead for having cooperated with Americans. Then the Chron publishes a story about Iraqi refugees who got visas and were provided places to live by the government, only to find that those places mostly in East Oakland were more hellish and dangerous than Iraq.
"Had I known about this place, I'd never have agreed to come," says one 33-year-old refugee, Oday Fatah, who hails from Baghdad and was relocated to the Fruitvale area. Another refugee, Ghazwan Al-Sharif whose sister was brutally attacked in Iraq and his family threatened because of his job as an interpreter was beaten and mugged in the Fruitvale, and later attempted suicide. After these incidents, he was given new housing in the Tenderloin. Refugees like Fatah and Al-Sharif are at the mercy of the nonprofit International Rescue Committee which works with the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration to resettle the refugees. They often choose places like East Oakland because they are not only cheap, but they're diverse, and they offer some possibility for the refugees to pay their own rent something they must do within a couple of months of resettlement.
Of the 60,000 Iraqi refugees to settle in the U.S. since 2003, some 14,000 have done so in California.
NPR also had a related story by one of their Baghdad producers, himself a former interpreter who gave up the job because it was too dangerous, and became a journalist instead. He remains in Baghdad, and sounds fairly scared now that there are "no American boots in Iraq."
