Iraq's middle class escapes, only to find poverty in Jordan

AMMAN: After her husband was killed, Amira sold a generation of her family's belongings, packed up her children, and left their large house with its gardener and maid.

Now, a year later, she is making meat fritters to earn money in this sand-colored capital, unable to afford glasses for her son, and in the quiet moments, choking on the bitterness of loss.

The war has scattered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis throughout the Middle East, but those who came to this capital of highways and fast food restaurants tended to be the most affluent. Most lacked residency status and were not allowed to work, but as former bank managers, social club directors and business owners, they thought their money would last.

It has not. Rents are high, schools cost money, and under-the-table jobs pay little. A survey of 100 Iraqi families this spring found that 64 percent were surviving by selling off their assets.

Now, as a new school year begins, many Iraqis here say they can no longer afford some of life's most basic requirements - education for their children and hospital visits for their families. Teeth are pulled instead of filled. Shampoo is no longer on the grocery list.

"My savings are finished," said Amira, who is 50. "My kids won't be in school this year."

It is a painful new reality for an important part of Iraq's population. The upper middle classes were Iraq's educated, secular center. They refused to take sides as the violence got worse. And their suffering is not only personal. The poorer they grow and the longer they stay away, the more crippled Iraq becomes, making it difficult for any American effort to put the country back together again.

"The binding section of the population does not exist anymore," said Ayad Allawi, a former prime minister of Iraq, who now spends most of his time in Jordan. "The middle class has left Iraq."

Iraqis streamed into Jordan and Syria in 2005 and 2006, with the professional class picking Jordan. The signs on the second floor of al-Essra Hospital, a private hospital in central Amman, contain only Iraqi doctors' names. The Jordanians have been relatively lenient, registering doctors in their medical unions and allowing those without residency permits, the vast majority of Iraqis here, to live unmolested, virtually without arrests or deportations.

But by early this year Iraqis were weighing so heavily on this small country that the Jordanian authorities sharply reduced the numbers they accepted.

Many who came thought Jordan would be a temporary stop on the way to asylum in Australia or Sweden, or a brief vacation from Baghdad's inferno. But as the months wore on, it became clear that most countries were closed to Iraqis, the war was only getting worse, and families were left stranded, burning through their savings.

The Australian authorities twice rejected Hassan Jabr, a Spanish teacher who left his elegant home and garden in Baghdad after his 12-year old son was kidnapped and killed last year. Now, with his savings gone, badly dented before he left by a $10,000 ransom he paid to try to get his son back, he is living off his family's food ration cards his mother sells in Baghdad.

"We saw reality in Amman and we were shocked," he said, sitting in his spare one-room apartment in eastern Amman. "We planned for two months."

Iraqis here have never been formally counted. A survey by a Norwegian group, Fafo, which has not yet been made public, is expected to report there are less than half of the 750,000 Iraqis commonly estimated to be in Jordan.

But that still is 10 percent of Amman's 2 million population and aid agencies have stepped up activities.

One of the biggest concerns is education, and aid agencies are trying to address it. The Jordanian government, under pressure from the United States, has agreed to let Iraqi children without residency attend public schools, a right not extended to any other foreigners.

Until now, Iraqis have either stayed out of school or attended private school, a moderate cost that has become untenable as savings disappear.

But Jordanian schools are already crowded and the government has not yet prepared for the change, arguing it should receive funding to help ease a humanitarian crisis caused by someone else's policy. United Nations agencies are asking for extra funds to expand, at first by adding new shifts to existing schools.

It is not clear yet how it will work on the ground. Save the Children, a humanitarian group helping to organize the effort, says it has referred 4,000 young Iraqis to schools in recent months, but that the referral does not guarantee acceptance.

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