Nashwan Hassan Ahmed's belief in the US mission in Iraq never wavered.
Hired fresh out of Baghdad University, he served for 18 months as an interpreter for US forces in Mosul.
Former colleagues recall him working bravely and tirelessly, side by side with troops on dangerous nighttime hunts for insurgents, and in the offices and conference rooms where the details of reconstruction projects were hammered out.
The days were long, but Ahmed, now 24, said he did not care, "because I felt that I was trying to help Iraq stand up again, and because I felt I was like a brother to them."
By "them," Ahmed meant the US soldiers he lived with and who came to call him Nash. He spent mornings with them at the shooting range and evenings playing video games.
He learned to like lasagna and root for the Atlanta Braves.
But then the threats started to come. Because of his work with US troops, some Iraqis saw Ahmed as a collaborator.
Ahmed said his family was harassed and abused, and they moved three times in an effort to hide from insurgents.
When Ahmed begged his US bosses for help, he was told they could do nothing. He said he finally realized that, for his family's safety, he would have to leave Iraq.
Alone, he crossed the border into Syria in January.
Ahmed is one of a growing group of Iraqis who used to work as interpreters, drivers or cooks for US forces in Iraq but have fled to Syria because the insurgency branded them as traitors. In recent months, Iraqis who are known to have worked with US troops have been killed or kidnapped in large numbers.
They were once among the most enthusiastic Iraqi supporters of the US-led invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
But now, they say, they feel confused and abandoned in a society that, with its ubiquitous banners bearing Syrian Baath Party slogans and huge portraits of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, and his family, reminds them at least superficially of Saddam's Iraq.
Ajmal Khybari, an official in Damascus with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said that, though their numbers, in relative terms, are small -- perhaps no more than a couple of hundred -- these former US employees represented a highly visible subgroup of the Iraqi refugees who continued to arrive in Syria and Jordan.
They bombard US consular officials with their visa requests, but -- despite their idiomatic English and their reference letters from US commanders -- without relatives in the US, their chances of being admitted are slim.
The US Embassy in Syria often suggests that they apply to the UN for refugee status and resettlement, but only a small fraction of Iraqi refugees complete the long registration process.
"We've processed 16,600 Iraqi refugees in Syria," Khybari said. "But let me speak from the heart here. We are really talking about a million refugees living between Syria and Jordan, and the donor community isn't paying any attention to them. The problem is growing, because Iraq continues to be a refugee-producing country."
At the time of the Iraqi election in late January, officials with the International Organization for Migration estimated that there were about 400,000 Iraqi refugees living in Syria.
The Syrian government now puts the figure at closer to 700,000.
The Iraqis, for their part, say they continue to hope that Syria is a temporary stop. Some of them seem bewildered to learn that, no matter how good their relationships with their US bosses were, there is no mechanism to help them.
Binyamin Shamoon, 36, who came to Damascus in August last yea, said he quit his job as a laundry worker at a US base in Baghdad after he received an anonymous letter that contained a threat to bomb his house.
The letter had stipulated only that he give up his job, but Shamoon said he did not feel safe until he brought his family to Syria.
"We would like to go to the US," Shamoon said. "But there is no program that helps us. This seems strange to me. It's because of our work with the Americans that we had to flee our country."
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