Whois
11-22-2004, 01:32 PM
Chicago Tribune
IRAQ IN TRANSITION
The best, brightest, wealthiest flee Iraq
Exodus a setback to reconstruction
By Liz Sly
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published November 21, 2004
AMMAN, Jordan -- When the kidnappers who had just released him in return for a $105,000 ransom called his home to ask for an extra $50,000, Shafiq Noori made a decision he never imagined he would make.
He would pack up, get out and leave Iraq for good.
He hired armed guards just long enough to make the necessary arrangements. Then he gathered his wife and children and headed for neighboring Jordan, joining an accelerating exodus of wealthy and middle-class Iraqis that augurs ill for Iraq's attempts at recovery.
"I'm going to stay here," said Noori, 34, who left behind a date-farming business in Baghdad and last month purchased a $200,000 apartment for his family in Jordan's capital, Amman.
"Iraq is my country, and I didn't want to leave," he added as he took his son for a haircut in one of the wealthy Amman neighborhoods favored by Jordan's new refugees. "If the situation gets better, I will go back, but I think it will get worse."
In recent months, tens of thousands of Iraqis have made similar decisions, some spurred by the hazards of daily life in Iraq, some by their personal experiences of kidnapping or armed robbery, and others simply because they see no future in a country that seems to grow more violent with each passing day.
Many of those who are leaving are taking with them the skills, the capital and the expertise that Iraq will need whenever the country becomes stable enough to start the still-stalled process of reconstruction.
"All the rich people, the professionals, the educated people are leaving because they don't want to be kidnapped or robbed," said Wael Aljaabari, an Amman real estate agent who says relocating Iraqis now account for 70 percent of his business.
"At first, they were coming and going. They rented for a few months, then they went back, " he said. "Now they are staying. They're buying, they're settling, they're investing."
There are no official figures on how many Iraqis have left the country recently or how many are arriving in Jordan. But anecdotal evidence suggests the numbers are significant, said Radwan Abdullah, an analyst in Jordan who has researched the issue.
"I believe there are hundreds of thousands of them, and the indications are that they are coming to stay," he said.
Some simply use Jordan as a stopping-off point before they head elsewhere to look for opportunities. Others reportedly are going to Syria, which is more affordable to poorer refugees but has fewer job prospects.
The influx is fueling a property boom in Amman that has seen prices climb by as much as 50 percent since the war. Government data show Iraqis are now the leading purchasers of deluxe homes in Amman.
Aljaabari estimated that Amman's half-dozen leading property agencies have sold 40,000 to 50,000 properties to Iraqis in the past six months, since the uprising in Fallujah last April provoked a fresh exodus.
Iraqis have been moving to Jordan ever since Saddam Hussein's regime fell. The months after the invasion brought an influx of former Baath Party officials and their families, including Hussein's daughters, Rana and Raghad, who live in a rented villa in Amman's wealthy Abdoun neighborhood.
`It means they lack faith'
But this latest wave is different because the people fleeing include those who welcomed the U.S.-led invasion and had hopes for the future but have given up.
"All kinds of people are coming," Abdullah said. "It means they lack faith."
Among them is Sadiq Farhan, 55, a Shiite businessman who saw big opportunities for his Baghdad juice factory after the toppling of Hussein and the lifting of United Nations economic sanctions that had been imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait.
He said he sold his family's second Baghdad home for $150,000, which he planned to use to invest in new equipment. The same night, a dozen armed men wearing police uniforms turned up at his home and forced him to hand over the cash, he said. When armed men again tried to storm his home a week later, he got out.
That was in January, and more than 20 of his closer friends and their families have since joined him in Amman.
"The people I know who are still in Iraq have no money, and the ones who have money were threatened or killed so they all left," said Farhan, who has bought a juice factory in Jordan and is building a large villa in Amman.
One 28-year-old woman said she fled in fear last month after a note was posted on a colleague's windshield--inside the American headquarters at Baghdad's airport--threatening her and five co-workers with death.
"I have lived my whole life in Baghdad. I love my country, and I was totally against leaving it," said the woman, who asked that her name be withheld because she had been working as a civil engineer for an American company and didn't want to endanger her family still in Iraq.
"I was so excited about the rebuilding, and I had all these dreams about being a part of it," the woman said. "We all believed that with the presence of the Americans, Iraq would be like a little heaven."
She doesn't envisage returning any time soon, despite U.S. promises that the insurgency will be crushed and democratic elections will be held in January.
"I'm just so tired of being scared all the time, and I don't want to waste the next 10 years of my life," she said.
Contracts going to Americans
Even people with no personal experience of the violence are getting out.
After the invasion, Majid Saman, 27, an engineering graduate, set up a consultancy and looked forward to a flurry of work. Instead, he said, he found that reconstruction contracts were going mainly to American companies, and their local hires have to go to the Green Zone or other American bases to work.
"If you do that, you get threatened by many groups. They call you a traitor," he said over a cappuccino at one of Amman's glitzy malls. "I know of many people who worked for the Americans [and] were threatened. They ignored the threat, and they were killed."
Saman said his last contract, which was to help renovate Baghdad's Sheraton Hotel, was abandoned after the hotel was repeatedly hit by mortars. Seeing no prospects for an ambitious engineer, he sold his car and furniture and left two weeks ago.
"I want to be something," he said. "I want my own income, and my own house and not always to be dependent on my family. In Iraq, it's hopeless."
"Khalas," he added, using the Arabic word for "finished" and slapping his hands together in a gesture of finality. "I'm never going back."
IRAQ IN TRANSITION
The best, brightest, wealthiest flee Iraq
Exodus a setback to reconstruction
By Liz Sly
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published November 21, 2004
AMMAN, Jordan -- When the kidnappers who had just released him in return for a $105,000 ransom called his home to ask for an extra $50,000, Shafiq Noori made a decision he never imagined he would make.
He would pack up, get out and leave Iraq for good.
He hired armed guards just long enough to make the necessary arrangements. Then he gathered his wife and children and headed for neighboring Jordan, joining an accelerating exodus of wealthy and middle-class Iraqis that augurs ill for Iraq's attempts at recovery.
"I'm going to stay here," said Noori, 34, who left behind a date-farming business in Baghdad and last month purchased a $200,000 apartment for his family in Jordan's capital, Amman.
"Iraq is my country, and I didn't want to leave," he added as he took his son for a haircut in one of the wealthy Amman neighborhoods favored by Jordan's new refugees. "If the situation gets better, I will go back, but I think it will get worse."
In recent months, tens of thousands of Iraqis have made similar decisions, some spurred by the hazards of daily life in Iraq, some by their personal experiences of kidnapping or armed robbery, and others simply because they see no future in a country that seems to grow more violent with each passing day.
Many of those who are leaving are taking with them the skills, the capital and the expertise that Iraq will need whenever the country becomes stable enough to start the still-stalled process of reconstruction.
"All the rich people, the professionals, the educated people are leaving because they don't want to be kidnapped or robbed," said Wael Aljaabari, an Amman real estate agent who says relocating Iraqis now account for 70 percent of his business.
"At first, they were coming and going. They rented for a few months, then they went back, " he said. "Now they are staying. They're buying, they're settling, they're investing."
There are no official figures on how many Iraqis have left the country recently or how many are arriving in Jordan. But anecdotal evidence suggests the numbers are significant, said Radwan Abdullah, an analyst in Jordan who has researched the issue.
"I believe there are hundreds of thousands of them, and the indications are that they are coming to stay," he said.
Some simply use Jordan as a stopping-off point before they head elsewhere to look for opportunities. Others reportedly are going to Syria, which is more affordable to poorer refugees but has fewer job prospects.
The influx is fueling a property boom in Amman that has seen prices climb by as much as 50 percent since the war. Government data show Iraqis are now the leading purchasers of deluxe homes in Amman.
Aljaabari estimated that Amman's half-dozen leading property agencies have sold 40,000 to 50,000 properties to Iraqis in the past six months, since the uprising in Fallujah last April provoked a fresh exodus.
Iraqis have been moving to Jordan ever since Saddam Hussein's regime fell. The months after the invasion brought an influx of former Baath Party officials and their families, including Hussein's daughters, Rana and Raghad, who live in a rented villa in Amman's wealthy Abdoun neighborhood.
`It means they lack faith'
But this latest wave is different because the people fleeing include those who welcomed the U.S.-led invasion and had hopes for the future but have given up.
"All kinds of people are coming," Abdullah said. "It means they lack faith."
Among them is Sadiq Farhan, 55, a Shiite businessman who saw big opportunities for his Baghdad juice factory after the toppling of Hussein and the lifting of United Nations economic sanctions that had been imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait.
He said he sold his family's second Baghdad home for $150,000, which he planned to use to invest in new equipment. The same night, a dozen armed men wearing police uniforms turned up at his home and forced him to hand over the cash, he said. When armed men again tried to storm his home a week later, he got out.
That was in January, and more than 20 of his closer friends and their families have since joined him in Amman.
"The people I know who are still in Iraq have no money, and the ones who have money were threatened or killed so they all left," said Farhan, who has bought a juice factory in Jordan and is building a large villa in Amman.
One 28-year-old woman said she fled in fear last month after a note was posted on a colleague's windshield--inside the American headquarters at Baghdad's airport--threatening her and five co-workers with death.
"I have lived my whole life in Baghdad. I love my country, and I was totally against leaving it," said the woman, who asked that her name be withheld because she had been working as a civil engineer for an American company and didn't want to endanger her family still in Iraq.
"I was so excited about the rebuilding, and I had all these dreams about being a part of it," the woman said. "We all believed that with the presence of the Americans, Iraq would be like a little heaven."
She doesn't envisage returning any time soon, despite U.S. promises that the insurgency will be crushed and democratic elections will be held in January.
"I'm just so tired of being scared all the time, and I don't want to waste the next 10 years of my life," she said.
Contracts going to Americans
Even people with no personal experience of the violence are getting out.
After the invasion, Majid Saman, 27, an engineering graduate, set up a consultancy and looked forward to a flurry of work. Instead, he said, he found that reconstruction contracts were going mainly to American companies, and their local hires have to go to the Green Zone or other American bases to work.
"If you do that, you get threatened by many groups. They call you a traitor," he said over a cappuccino at one of Amman's glitzy malls. "I know of many people who worked for the Americans [and] were threatened. They ignored the threat, and they were killed."
Saman said his last contract, which was to help renovate Baghdad's Sheraton Hotel, was abandoned after the hotel was repeatedly hit by mortars. Seeing no prospects for an ambitious engineer, he sold his car and furniture and left two weeks ago.
"I want to be something," he said. "I want my own income, and my own house and not always to be dependent on my family. In Iraq, it's hopeless."
"Khalas," he added, using the Arabic word for "finished" and slapping his hands together in a gesture of finality. "I'm never going back."