The war in Iraq has spawned the largest population movement in the Middle East since Palestinians were displaced following the creation of Israel in 1948, a human rights group said yesterday, accusing Western countries of not doing enough to help the refugees.
Amnesty International said Syria and Jordan were struggling to deal with the huge influx of Iraqis, and that many Western countries -- including those that participated in the country's 2003 invasion -- were turning a cold shoulder to those trying to flee the conflict.
"The international community has thus far paid lip-service to the needs of Iraq's displaced people with insufficient effort made to provide ... assistance or resettlement for those forced to flee their homeland," Amnesty said in a statement.
According to the UN High Commission on Refugees, more than 2 million Iraqis have been forced to take refuge in neighboring countries. Of these, 1.2 million are in Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon. 10,000 in Turkey and 200,000 in various Persian Gulf countries.
The US assists in financing their resettlement, but Amnesty said the contributions being made by the US and its allies fell "significantly short" of the money the Jordanian and Syrian governments say they need to deal with the crisis.
It added that some countries were forcing Iraqis to return to their violence-wracked homeland. It called Britain "one of the key players in forcible returns of Iraqis" and said the country had been returning failed Kurdish asylum-seekers to Irbil, in northern Iraq, since 2005.
Amnesty said other countries, including Germany, Greece, Poland, and the Netherlands were sending unwilling Iraqis back to their country as well. Some of them were deported on criminal or national security grounds, and most were then returned to Syria, Jordan, or northern Iraq -- which has been spared the country's worse carnage.
Resettlement of Iraqi refugees has fallen even as the violence in the country continues, the report said, adding that many countries -- including Britain and the US -- were not accepting as many Iraqis as they could.
The organization welcomed the Bush administration's announcement on Wednesday that it would sharply increase the number of Iraqi refugees it would admit to the US.
But the US has had trouble bringing over even the number of refugees it is willing to accept.
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