Iraqi refugees in Syria face poverty trap

By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Among the impoverished Iraqi refugees queuing for food aid at a Catholic charity in Damascus stands 65-year-old Hirmiz Hanna, puzzled and upset at his fate.

Now retired, he worked all his life at the state oil company in Kirkuk. His wife and three children have university degrees. The Christian family was relatively well off until death threats forced them to abandon their home and flee to Syria a year ago.

"I've come here to get some assistance, some food. Anything will do, it will help," Hanna said in fluent English. The centre run by the Caritas relief agency had offered him food vouchers worth 1,500 Syrian pounds ($30) a month for six months.

"But for how long do we stay here? We can't go back to Iraq. We'll be killed en route," he said, waiting in jacket and tie at a church annex in the shabby Jaramana area, swamped with Iraqis.

Syria says it now hosts 1.4 million Iraqi "guests" who have fled the relentless violence unleashed by the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in 2003.

"We expected to live freely like the rest of the world after the liberation, or invasion, but unfortunately it turned out the other way round. We wanted freedom, but we didn't want it that way," said Hanna. "Now we need to leave Syria, to emigrate."

But the West's doors are largely closed to Iraqi refugees, while Syria and Jordan, the main host countries, are finding the strain on their own limited resources increasingly irksome.

SURVIVAL SEX

Middle-class Iraqis like Hanna face the creeping humiliation of poverty as the savings they brought with them are exhausted.

Many of their poorer compatriots are already desperate. Some have even resorted to prostitution, despite the shame attached.

"We are defining it as survival sex," said Sybella Wilkes, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). "If these families had any other option, they wouldn't put their girls, their daughters, sisters, into commercial sex."

She said a program to identify and help such families was still in the planning stages, although UNHCR was supporting a small shelter for women victims run by nuns in Damascus.

Iraqis are still streaming over the Syrian border, sometimes at a rate of 1,000 a day, each bringing tales of the misery, sectarian bloodshed and insecurity that have uprooted them.

At a UNHCR registration centre near Damascus, a man who gave his name as Adnan, 25, said he had fled Iraq two days earlier.

"I worked for the police in Mosul. The terrorists couldn't get me so they went for my brother. They killed him with eight bullets," he said, his blue eyes shifting nervously around him.