A Refugee from the Iraq War

When we walked into Samia Kouzah's dingy two-room flat in Zarqa, Jordan, I almost didn't recognize her daughter as human. Rahmad, age twenty months, sat on the couch quietly looking at us. She has a severely deformed skull, shaped like a mushroom, and her eyes bulge out like a cartoon.

Samia became pregnant with her daughter while living in Baghdad. She suspects radioactive materials used in U.S. bombs caused the deformities. The doctor who delivered Rahmad said she wouldn't live past one year old. In September, Rahmad will turn two.

Rahmad sat on her mother's lap, enveloped in Samia's blue and beige veil, and began to fuss. "She has a fever," Samia explained. "She's teething."

Samia is a thirty-three-year-old Palestinian woman born in Iraq. Her family was part of the mass 1948 migration of Palestinians. Because of her legal status, she finds herself stuck in Zarqa, Jordan's second largest city, forty-minutes away from Amman. It's a bleak, dusty industrial town that for decades has absorbed waves of immigrants--Egyptians, Palestinians, Chechens, and now Iraqis. (Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, hailed from these poverty-stricken streets. Zarqawi literally means someone from Zarqa.)

Jordan's government grants legal residency to a very small percentage of the estimated one million Iraqis who have fled their war-torn land. Wealthy Iraqis can buy residency with a deposit of $100,000 in the bank. Some middle class professionals are able to get work permits. But many Iraqis are simply overstaying their visas. The Jordanian government has not officially recognized them as refugees. They are considered "guests."

People like Samia, though, live in a legal no man's land, as she is technically not an Iraqi (she showed us her ID). And she is not Jordanian. So her six-year-old son, Mohammed, isn't able to attend public schools.

The Kouzah family fled Baghdad in 2006. She said Iraqis went after Palestinians after the U.S. occupation began. Her husband worked as an electrician in Baghdad. But he's been deported from Jordan (he, too, lacked legal residency) and is now living in Bethlehem, in the West Bank. He's not working now and cannot support the family.

Samia says she is willing to work but she cannot leave the house due to her daughter's condition. The family is surviving on assistance from a brother and from NGOs such as Al Tamkeen, a local project funded by the International Rescue Committee and implemented by the Near East Foundation. Samia said the United Nations High Commission for Refugees hasn't done much for her.

I visited Samia with project directors from the Near East Foundation and the local Al Tamkeen contact. They asked Samia if she needed anything. "Only bring my husband back," she said.