IRAQ: For some Iraqis, it’s first-class flights home

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As Americans complain about rising air travel costs, cramped planes and miserably long check-in lines at airports, some Iraqis are enjoying free travel in the prime minister’s jet, all part of the Iraqi government’s drive to bring people back to their war-torn homeland.

The first of what the Iraqi government says will be regular flights bringing refugees back on the A300 normally used by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki arrived Monday afternoon in Baghdad. The first sign that this was no regular flight was the stairway wheeled out to the airplane door. It had a red carpet.

Returning Iraqis, many clutching bundles of belongings and small children, walked gingerly down the steps, slowed by the large Iraqi flags that they were given that flapped across their faces in the stiff wind.

Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta Mousawi, an Iraqi government and security spokesman, said Maliki had arranged for such flights to take place each week. Flights will come from Syria and Jordan in addition to Egypt. The three countries host the largest numbers of Iraqis who have fled since the U.S. invasion of 2003.

Each trip will carry about 250 people. Government officials are hoping that by offering an easy way home, more Iraqis will be willing to return and help the country recover from five years of war. So far, most have seemed resistant to the idea, not convinced that the relative calm in most of the country will hold.

International organizations say about 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the country since 2003. Only a relative handful have returned. A recent report by the International Organization for Migration said about 16% of the 16,848 families that have returned home had come from outside Iraq. The rest were internally displaced.

The United Nations, IOM and similar organizations have warned against bringing people back too soon, before communities are able to receive them. Some of the problems confronting returnees, including those coming home from having fled to other places inside Iraq, include lack of access to basic services, returning to badly damaged homes and finding other people living in their houses.

And though the government insists that most people who return home do so because they feel safe, some returnees say they come back because they have to. It’s expensive to live elsewhere, and many are finding it impossible to find jobs or to put their children in school.

‘If I had more money, I would have stayed and never gone back,’ Abu Hussein, a 32-year-old Shiite merchant, told the Associated Press while waiting to board Monday’s flight at Cairo’s airport. ‘We hear from other returnees that they had regret going back because there is still bombing, kidnapping and killing.’

--Tina Susman in Baghdad