The Fleeting Success of the Surge

Reports of Iraqi refugees returning to Baghdad fill Adnan and Noora Awadi with envy and nostalgia. The young couple--whose names have been changed, since they fear reprisals if quoted in the media--fled to the Jordanian capital, Amman, in the summer of 2006 and are yearning to go back to their leafy street in al-Yarmouk, a middle-class neighborhood in Baghdad. Noora, 28, misses their modest one-story home so much, she is sentimental even about its defects. "The sink in the kitchen is cracked, there are termites everywhere, and sometimes in the summer we can smell our neighbor's toilet from our living room--but I swear I would go back there this minute," she says wistfully. "If we had hope of some kind of life in Baghdad, I would walk all the way." Adnan, a physician, feels the tug of home too, but he keeps a check on his emotions. "If we had hope ..." he repeats after his wife. "But do we have hope?"

It's a question the Awadis and hundreds of thousands of other exiled Baghdadis ask every day. The bloody sectarian war that drove them from their city having abated, the temptation to return has grown. In recent weeks, several thousand refugees have journeyed home--mostly from Syria, which has introduced tough new visa regulations designed to send back Iraqis and turn away new waves at the border. Many had simply run through their life's savings and could no longer afford exile. (The Iraqi government has offered cash, free transport from the border and other inducements for those who agree to go back.) Perhaps tellingly, so far there have been few returnees from Jordan, the preferred destination of educated, middle-class Iraqis like the Awadis.

Humanitarian agencies reckon that there are 750,000 Iraqis in Jordan and 1.5 million in Syria. Fewer than 30,000 have returned, and many of them will simply join the ranks of the 2.4 million who are classified as "internally displaced persons"--living in Iraq but unable to return to their old neighborhoods because they are now run by sectarian militias. That hasn't stopped the Iraqi government from declaring that peace is at hand. Welcoming one recent batch of returnees, Ali Dabbagh, spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said, "We are eager to have Iraqis return and live a normal, safe life."

In truth, Baghdad is nothing like normal and still some distance from safe. The number of sectarian killings is down, but few Sunnis dare to venture into Shi'ite neighborhoods, and vice versa. U.S. military commanders, whose efforts have led to the sharp reduction in violence, have been cautioning against reading too much into the statistics. "Nobody says anything about turning a corner, seeing lights at the end of tunnels, any of those phrases," General David Petraeus told journalists on Dec. 6. "There's nobody in uniform who is doing victory dances in the end zone."

Petraeus' words may have been directed at Washington, where some Administration officials have been crowing about the success of the military surge strategy. Iraqis living in exile don't need to be told it's too soon to celebrate. Most carry terrible memories of the violence that forced them to flee in the first place. Many refugees lost loved ones, either to the Shi'ite mobs that rampaged unchecked through the streets of Baghdad several times last year or to reprisal killings by Sunni insurgents. The Awadis were lucky: they had fair warning. Adnan still remembers the strong body odor of the six armed men from the Shi'ite Mahdi Army militia who walked into his office at the Health Ministry and demanded that he quit his job and get out of the country. Said the leader of the group: "We are cleaning the government, throwing out Sunni garbage like you." He told Adnan what would happen if he didn't obey. "They would kidnap all of us, put drills into the eyes of me and my son, but only after we had witnessed my wife and daughter being raped," he says. "Then they would kill all of us." The leader reached into his pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle. In it was a pair of round, bloodstained objects Adnan recognized at once: "Human eyeballs."

Baghdad may be safer than it was, but people like the Awadis worry that the gains of the surge are temporary and predicated on a massive American presence. They point out that Iraq's political leadership has failed to use the relative calm to engineer any real reconciliation between the majority Shi'ites and the Sunnis. While U.S. troops have battled al-Qaeda in Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala, the Iraqi Parliament has made little progress on critical legislation in more than a year. And partly because of massive government corruption, improvements in basic services like electricity, water and fuel have lagged behind security gains. Baghdad gets an average of eight hours of electricity a day, about half the prewar level. So while there's a trickle of refugees going home, many Iraqis continue to leave Baghdad. Here are four reasons families like the Awadis are not yet packing their bags for home.

The Killers Are Still at Large

The U.S. military has recruited thousands of Sunni insurgents to join the fight against jihadist groups like al-Qaeda, but the Shi'ite militias mainly responsible for last year's sectarian carnage remain largely untouched. In August, Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, ordered it not to attack American troops. But U.S. commanders on the ground know there was no goodwill behind the decision. "It wasn't because Sadr saw Jesus--let's put it that way," says Major Christopher Coglianese, a staff officer in Baghdad. More likely, the Mahdi Army is waiting for the Americans to begin their drawdown from Baghdad next year. Sunnis worry that when the U.S. troops leave, the Shi'ite militias will resume their pogroms.

The al-Maliki government has promised to integrate more militiamen into government forces, but that's hardly reassuring. Adnan Awadi's former colleagues have told him that the Mahdi Army men who threatened him all now have jobs in the Health Ministry. "If I show my face there again ... my son's eyeballs will end up in a bottle," Adnan says.

The Sunnis Remain Out in the Cold

The U.S. military may have embraced Sunni insurgents, but the al-Maliki government has been less enthusiastic. American officials say Sunni "concerned citizens" groups (a euphemism for armed groups that protect Sunni areas) are examples of "bottom-up reconciliation." The officials say the best way to keep the Sunni fighters from returning to the insurgency is to integrate them into official Iraqi forces, just as the Shi'ite militias have been. But many Shi'ite leaders see Sunni groups as a long-term threat--a fifth column within the armed forces. The distrust is so deep that many Sunni fighters injured in battles against al-Qaeda have to be taken to U.S. military hospitals because they would not be safe in the Shi'ite-controlled Iraqi medical system.