By Steve Negus
Financial Times, 18 June 2007
Before the 2003 invasion, Saher – a pseudonym chosen by a 34-year-old Christian electrical engineer – lived in relative comfort, employed at a state-owned factory with a home in a middle-class district in the then ethnically-mixed suburb of Dura.
Forced to flee Baghdad after receiving death threats, he now lives with seven relatives stuffed into three rooms on the upper floor of a house in the relatively safe Kurdish autonomous zone in northern Iraq.
Saher is one of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi professionals who weathered the years of sanctions under Saddam, only to have their prospects wiped out under the post-invasion chaos.
“In Saddam’s time there were no freedoms, but there was security, everything was available in the market and salaries were enough,” Saher says. “Now we work two or three jobs and we can’t live.”
According to statistics published by the US-based Brookings Institute, some 40 per cent of Iraq’s professional class has fled abroad, part of the 2.2m Iraqis who have left the country since the war and are now living in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf.
Others, like Saher, number among the 2m Iraqis whom the United Nations estimated in 2006 had been internally displaced.
The total displaced in the last four years is now roughly equal to the 4m Iraqis who fled political and ethnic persecution, war, and the economic hardship caused by sanctions while Saddam Hussein was in power, and the number continues to rise.
The plight of the members of Iraq’s middle class stands out in part because they are more visible, and it is easier for them to leave the country.
Saher says that the more economically desperate of his neighbours did not even have the chance to flee, or went abroad only to return to Baghdad’s dangers because they had no way to sustain themselves.
But the middle class also appears to have suffered disproportionately because it is more vulnerable – even a small amount of visible wealth makes you a target for kidnappers.
Also, the rising new power in Iraq, the religious militia, is likely to see poorer Iraqis as its natural support base, but tends to distrust professionals and associates them with the downfallen Ba’ath party, membership of which was necessary for advancement in most careers.
The middle class is also more likely to live in areas that are hardest hit by the political violence, in particular, the formerly mixed-sectarian suburbs of western and southern Baghdad.
In Saher’s district, for example, one neighbour was gunned down in front of his house, while another had his son kidnapped on the way to school. A mortar shell landed on Saher’s roof, while his father-in-law’s house nearby was collapsed by a car bomb.
Saher finally fled Dura in mid-2006, as Sunni insurgents and Shia militias battled for control of the city. The final straw was extortion notices, demanding that the family either pay money to one of the armed groups, or evacuate.
Saher was lucky in that he was able to transfer his public sector factory job in Baghdad to government work in the north, but many Iraqis, particularly those in Syria, report that they have no way of earning an income at all.
Even so, he does not hold much hope for the future. Costs are high in Irbil – thanks in part to the flood of refugees from the south into Kurdistan – and Saher’s salary, together with money earned by his brother and his father’s pension, is barely enough to pay the rent. Nor is there much indication that security will improve enough in Dura for him to be able to return.
“I don’t have any expectations,” he says. “This situation will continue as it is.”
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Citation: Steve Negus. "Iraq’s professionals flee death threats," Financial Times, 18 June 2007.
Original URL: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/6595984e-1db4-11dc-89f7-000b5df10621,dwp_uuid=fc3334c0-2f7a-11da-8b51-00000e2511c8,print=yes.html
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