Waiting for the Iraqi exodus

Waiting for the Iraqi exodus

By Martin Asser BBC News Online, Ruweished, Jordan

The wind makes life hard for everyone in Ruweished

In the far-eastern reaches of Jordan, where the flat, featureless desert stretches away towards the Euphrates, they are awaiting a humanitarian catastrophe.

Ruweished - a remote desert outpost nearly 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the next population centre - has been thrust into the limelight by a geographical quirk of fate.

It is one of very few gateways to embattled Iraq, where emergency relief organisations have made preparations for the thousands of Iraqi citizens who had been expected to flee the twin terrors of coalition bombing and the death throes of Saddam Hussein's regime.

But - to the astonishment of many - the Iraqis have so far failed to show up.

"There's nobody here," says the smiling police colonel in charge of Camp B, 10 kilometres (six miles) east of Ruweished, as he stuffs strips of green card into the cracks around the window of his wind-swept corrugated iron hut.

"The Iraqian people, they no leave," he continues in broken English. "They fight, they defend their home."

Outside, rows of hundreds of empty tents flap violently in the gale, so violently that within a few hours, relief workers are forced to take them down so they don't fly away.

More pictures of the camp

Speculation about the absence of Iraqis is not confined to their steadfastness, however - others suspect the still-powerful regime, or the danger of travel under aerial bombardment, has prevented the flow of refugees.

The only traffic cross-border I have witnessed has been two young men from Basra who are going back to Iraq, "to take part in the defence of their homeland".

Indeed, about 5,000 Iraqis are reported to have crossed from Jordan since the bombardment began - underlining the unpredictability of this conflict in which Washington talks with confidence about certain victory.

'Nowhere to go'

Five kilometres further down the road, we reach Camp A, run jointly by the International Organisation for Migration and the Jordanian Red Crescent.

This camp does have inhabitants - about 170 third-country nationals from Somalia, Eritrea and Djibouti. More than 300 Sudanese have already been transported back to their homeland.

Red Crescent volunteers have to work in very difficult conditions

Jaami', a Somali who spent 16 years in Iraq, is huddling in a tent with his wife and three young children.

"What can we do? We have nowhere to go. In my country there is war, and the situation in Iraq is too bad," he says.

Jaami' is waiting for the IOM to help him locate a safe destination - or he says, if there is peace, maybe he'll go back to Iraq.

One of two Djiboutian citizens in the camp says he will only go back if the foreign troops are repulsed. Otherwise he fears spending a long time in the inhospitable Jordanian desert.

"I think they've forgotten me," he says. "Everyday I go to the IOM and say I want to go to Djibouti. They tell me 'tomorrow, tomorrow, come back tomorrow'."

The camp also contains 18 Palestinians, stranded with Iraqi or Egyptian documents which render them ineligible to enter Jordan - another sad footnote to their people's seemingly unending plight.

'Calm before the storm'

Relief workers - many of them veterans of the 1991 Gulf War, when tens of thousands of refugees arrived in Jordan - are easily coping with the scale of this crisis, if not the terrible weather battering the camp.

Empty tents are taken down to avoid sandstorm damage

"Some of us have been up all night making sure the tents stay up and distributing extra blankets because of the extreme cold," says Ibrahim Khubais, the deputy camp co-ordinator at Camp A.

His staff patrols the rows of tents, delivering supplies and hustling children back inside so they're not exposed to the biting wind.

Others are on duty with shovels to shore up any tents with gravel if they are in danger of being blown away.

"I think this is the calm before the storm," says one volunteer, well aware of the irony of his words as he tilts his head enveloped in a red and white scarf towards the gale.

"We're ready to accommodate up to 25,000 people in the two camps here, and I think they'll come... if the humanitarian crisis starts in Iraq, if the fighting reaches the cities in the next few days."