IRAQ: Walls closing in for Iraqi travelers

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

By Said Rifai in Baghdad

I grew up abroad and used to take traveling for granted.

From the day I was born, my family and I traveled several times a year. There were summer and winter vacations to exotic islands in the Far East, European road trips, shopping sprees in Hong Kong and the annual trip back to Iraq to visit with family, getting acquainted with the fatherland so to speak.

I traveled so much that I got sick of it at one point and just wanted to settle down. My wish came into being when my father retired and we moved back to Baghdad in 1993 - finally, a place to call home.

I didn’t leave again until college. When I failed my first year because of insufficient Arabic, my dad decided to send my brother and me to Jordan, where most of the curriculum was in English. Before the year was out, I was so homesick that I phoned my dad and asked to be transferred back to Baghdad. I think he was more than happy to do so, given the financial burden of having two sons studying abroad.

Then the war happened in 2003, and the whole dynamic shifted. One after another, all of my friends and most of my family left the country. With the advent of the Internet, I was able to reconnect with many of my friends from junior high and high school, all of them living and working abroad. Moreover, I needed a break every now and then, because of the stress of working in Iraq.

Traveling became a necessity to me. But the walls started closing in on Iraqis, because of the security problems here and the number of refugees flooding neighboring countries.

My brother, who settled in the United Arab Emirates and traveled frequently to Asia because of his work, fell in love with Vietnam and confided in me that he would like to settle there once he feels financially secure. But he’s stuck in the UAE because his residency has expired with no possibility of renewal.

To get away from his troubles, he thought it would be nice to go on holiday in Bangladesh.

‘I went to the Bangladeshi Embassy here to apply for a visa, you won’t believe what happened!’ he told me the last time we were chatting via instant messaging over the Internet.

‘They said that they had to do a background check on me before I could be considered for a visa!’ he typed.

Even though I couldn’t hear his voice, I could feel his distress.

‘Background check? For Bangladesh? Are you serious?’ I asked him.

‘Yeah, I just told them to shove it and left,’ he continued.

I myself have received occasional invitations from school friends to visit them abroad. One asked me to spend a couple of weeks in Hawaii. Another told me to come to Tokyo, a place I lived in for seven years. But it’s not practical when I have to lodge a visa application months prior to the trip, knowing full well that I probably won’t get it without a really good reason.

My parents relocated to Jordan, and I’ve always considered the place as my second home. But last time I went, it took my family 45 days to get permission for the visit.

‘Liberation.’ That’s what they called the invasion of Iraq. At one point I thought this would mean being treated like a citizen of the world again after years of war and sanctions. I was wrong.

‘You know, we are unwanted wherever we go,’ I remember telling my brother that day he applied for the visa to Bangladesh. ‘It’s like we’re a virus.’

P.S. The Los Angeles Times issues a free daily newsletter with the latest headlines from the Middle East, the war in Iraq and the frictions between the West and Islam. You can subscribe by registering at the website here, logging in here and clicking on the World: Mideast newsletter box here.