“The Fastest-Growing Humanitarian Crisis in the World”: Iraq's Refugee Nightmare

The US occupation of Iraq is generating one of the largest refugees crises in decades.

Reports from Refugees International, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) document in terrifying detail the desperate plight of Iraqis forced to flee their homes. Close to two million Iraqis have already fled the country, and the rate of the exodus -- currently at as many as 100,000 a month -- shows every sign of increasing.

That's only the tip of the iceberg. Another 1.7 million Iraqis have been driven by sectarian violence to leave their homes in integrated areas to live in an ethnic community inside Iraq. This internally displaced population is expanding by 50,000 each month, and the UNHCR predicts it could reach 2.7 million people by the end of 2007.

All told, nearly 4 million people out of a prewar population of 26 million have become either refugees or internally displaced. Almost one out of every six Iraqis has fled their homes since the US invaded in 2003. "The current exodus," according to the UNHCR, "is the largest long-term population movement since the displacement of the Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948."

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan07/Smith18.htm

on their TVs and watch the news.

said the chimp. :sarcasm:


:cry: