More than 46,000 Iraqi refugees returned home last month, government official says

The number of Iraqi refugees returning to their country after fleeing abroad is growing. According to an Iraqi government spokesman, more than 46,000 people came home last month, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.

According to the article “the latest figure comes as Iraq’s neighbors, particularly Syria and Jordan, have tightened their borders to Iraqis fleeing the turmoil in their own country. Syria is home to at least 1.2 million Iraqi refugees, and Jordan has about 750,000.”

“Many of those Iraqis are living in limbo,” the article adds, “unable to work and running out of whatever money they were able to bring out of Iraq.”

“According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, some 2 million Iraqis have fled their country. Besides Syria and Jordan, Egypt has absorbed 100,000. Some 54,000 Iraqis are in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon, 10,000 in Turkey and 200,000 in various Persian Gulf countries,” the article said.

The Iraqi Red Crescent issued a report Monday saying nearly 2.3 million Iraqis – most of them women and children – are currently internally displaced within the country.

The article noted that “the number of internally displaced people, or IDPs, in Iraq grew by 16 percent in September from the previous month, to 2,299,425, the Red Crescent said. That figure has skyrocketed since the beginning of 2007, when less than half a million people were listed as displaced.”

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