Comfort in a Cold Place

Iraqis in Stockholm fresh from Baghdad say the war is stripping Iraq of its skill base, driving out the people needed to rebuild the country's infrastructure, run businesses, and staff schools and hospitals. "For months people have been walking around Baghdad saying, 'Where's this person? Where's that person?'" says Raya, a 37-year-old doctor, a few hours after arriving in Stockholm. "Then someone will say: 'They've left; and they have left; and they have left.'" Raya, who did not want her last name published for fear her parents in Baghdad would be targeted, says she is the 11th doctor at the city's main maternity teaching hospital to flee. "Only my senior [doctor] is left," she says. Raya sits in a government asylum office in a Stockholm suburb, surrounded by her two small children and five other family members who have fled with her. Days after abandoning their large family house and garden, they now await a bus to take them to a refugee camp two hours from Stockholm. This group alone represents a significant loss of talent for Iraq: Raya's 24-year-old sister is a doctor who recently graduated second in her medical school class, her brother is a construction engineer who worked alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and her husband is a translator for Western diplomats in Baghdad.

Those professionals who have left feel they have no choice. The refugees describe a pattern of anonymous death threats by faceless armed groups, which some believe is designed to drive out middle-class Iraqis. Among the new arrivals in Sweden are hundreds of Iraqi Christians — including at least five priests — who say their tiny community is quickly vanishing. "My students threatened to kill me if I didn't graduate them, because I don't wear a head scarf," says a female engineering lecturer from Baghdad's University of Technology, one of hundreds who packed an Iraqi church service in the industrial town of Södertälje, southwest of Stockholm. Ali Hamid, a 33-year-old Shi'ite ophthalmologist, had a scrawled death threat slipped under his door; he fled last month, leaving behind his wife and two children. Raya, the maternity doctor, says her family decided to leave when her brother found a note tucked under his windshield wiper saying: "Your whole family will be killed because you work with the Americans." Raya and her sister tossed bedsheets over the living room furniture and fled to Syria, where they bought forged European papers and then boarded a flight for Prague.

Every Iraqi's flight is a boon for people smugglers. Sweden grants asylum freely, but Iraqi refugees need to get to the country first; for that, they need a fake European passport. Most Iraqis flee first to Jordan; from there smugglers arrange flights to Istanbul, where it is easy to find illegal European Union passports — "red passports," as the Iraqis call them. Thus equipped, it's into the E.U. and on to Sweden. Suad Turky, a 29-year-old Shi'ite religious student from Baghdad, paid a smuggler $10,000 to secure a false passport and a ticket to Stockholm via Turkey. She says she does not know what nationality passport she was issued. Last month, her cousin Mona Ahmad, a primary school teacher, took the same route, after two teachers at her school were kidnapped. "There is constant danger in Iraq, especially in Baghdad," says Turky. "Nobody can live there."

In Sweden, the government has opted to protect the Iraqis arriving, citing U.N. refugee guidelines to protect those fleeing, rather than pursuing them for using forged documents to enter Sweden. "They all say, 'We had illegal passports but we have thrown them away,'" says Gunn Sundberg-Hjelm, an asylum officer at the Swedish Migration Board. Other than checking their fingerprints against international databases, there is no practicable way to prove that the Iraqis are who they say they are. "We don't turn anyone back," says Sundberg-Hjelm. "Look at the circumstances they have left."

Alaa, Raya and others in Stockholm now wonder when they will be able to return. Raya, who spread sheets over her furniture to keep off the dust, now says that she doubts she will see her Baghdad home for several years. She plans to learn Swedish and practice as a gynecologist. For his part, Alaa, hunched over a borrowed computer in his small apartment, spends hours a day looking at digital photographs of his small son playing on his bed back in Iraq. Alaa hopes to get his Swedish residence papers sometime this year, allowing his wife and 1-year-old boy to join him from Baghdad. The exodus from Iraq is far from over.