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Iraq's Palestinian community suffers backlash

Thick smoke is seen on the skyline of Baghdad as the sun sets against the heavily fortified Green Zone area on Friday. Drive-by shootings, roadside bombings and sectarian killings left 30 dead in Iraq on Friday. PHOTO: AP

The bill of death appeared overnight, and was scattered on doorsteps and littering the sidewalk. It was addressed to "the Palestinian traitors."

"We warn you that we will eliminate you all if you don't leave the area for good within 10 days," the leaflet said. It bore the signature of a group called the Judgment Day Battalion, and the Palestinian residents of Hurriya, a northern Baghdad neighborhood, found it when they awoke on Thursday morning.

"We are ready to leave Iraq -- if we have the chance," a Palestinian resident said on Friday, declining to provide his name because of fear of retribution. "This is the opinion of everyone here. We feel unsafe, and today is better than tomorrow."

The Palestinian community was once a pet cause of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, who granted its members special treatment. But now, its members say, they are suffering the backlash of that favoritism, and are singled out for being Sunni Arabs.

As sectarian killings have intensified in the past several weeks, the Palestinians have been frequent targets of Shiite death squads, some in the uniforms of government security forces, several Palestinians said in interviews this week. Scores have been pulled from their homes in Palestinian enclaves around the capital, residents said, and many have turned up dead in the morgue.

The Palestinian observer to the UN has appealed to the Security Council for help, and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has warned of the potential for a crisis.

panic

Many Palestinian families "are in a state of shock and panic," according to a statement from the refugee agency distributed on Friday. "This panic may spread and lead to more Palestinians fleeing Baghdad." Many Palestinians pulled their children from schools and stopped going to work, the statement said.

Violence has afflicted every community in Iraq, which has suffered increased sectarian bloodshed since a major Shiite mosque in Samarra was bombed last month.

Insurgent attacks on Friday killed 12 people. One attack involved an improvised bomb that killed five worshipers and wounded 17 as they left a Sunni Arab mosque in Khalis east of Baghdad. The US military reported that two soldiers died in combat in Anbar Province on Thursday.

And the authorities recovered 15 more corpses from the streets of Baghdad on Friday, the latest victims in a wave of execution-style slayings. More than 200 bodies have been discovered in less than three weeks in the Baghdad area, according to the Interior Ministry.

Some victims have been Palestinians, relatives said in interviews, and community members insist they are targets because of their special relationship with Saddam and their sectarian allegiances.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian observer to the UN, said in a letter to the Security Council on Thursday that 10 Palestinians were killed and several kidnapped in the previous week alone. He appealed for international intervention to protect the Palestinians in Iraq.

The UN estimates that 34,000 Palestinians live in Iraq, and many were born in the country. They were given refuge during successive regional crises, beginning with the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.

Saddam, as part of his campaign to fashion himself into a pan-Arab leader, was particularly solicitous of their support. He provided many with free schooling, and free or heavily subsidized housing. But he did not give them the right to own property or the right to citizenship -- legal restrictions that remain.

With the fall of Saddam, many Palestinians were driven from their homes by property owners whose houses had been appropriated by Saddam. Others came under attack by resentful Iraqis.

Several Palestinians interviewed on Friday said the latest generation of violent persecution began last year. At first it was gradual: an unexplained detention here, an assassination there. But since the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, violence against Palestinians, particularly in Baghdad, has greatly escalated, community members say.

targets

"Now any Palestinian, whether a child or an adult, thinks of himself as a target," said Ali Hussein, 66, a resident of a housing complex for poor Palestinians in Baladiyat, in eastern Baghdad.

Another Baladiyat resident, Fatma Ahmed, said her husband was dragged from his barber shop on Jan. 15 by armed men and driven away. His family found his body in a morgue earlier this month with gunshots to the head and torture wounds on his body.

Sitting in her small apartment, Ahmed presented a reporter with typed testimony to her husband's life and unexplained death. "He was known as a hard worker and serious man," the document said, "and his only crime was being Palestinian."

On March 14, the UN high commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, sent a letter to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani expressing his concern about reports of violence against Palestinians, and "the limited capacity of the Iraqi security forces to provide effective protection," according to a spokeswoman for the refugee agency. Guterres suggested the creation of "a special protection office" in areas populated by Palestinians.

Last Sunday, 89 Palestinians from enclaves around Baghdad arrived at the Jordanian border seeking refuge. They were turned back by the Jordanian authorities, who closed the border on Monday, and they remained stranded for several days between the Iraqi and Jordanian border posts, a Jordanian government spokesman said.

On Wednesday, the Iraqi government moved them to an Iraqi camp near the border, where the UN refugee agency delivered supplies and food. Jordan reopened the border early on Thursday, according to a Jordanian spokesman.

The group is "adamant" that it does not want to remain in Iraq, according to a statement from the UN agency. "They said the killings, disappearances and hostage-taking, affecting their families, neighbors and friends, had become intolerable."
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