The U.S. has caused what Washington-based Refugees International calls the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world. The crisis is the flight of Iraqis from a country where life has become impossible to live. And one of the countries the White House slams at every opportunity is the country that’s doing our work for us by hosting the huge majority of people displaced by our war: Syria.
The President never misses a chance to talk about how insurgents cross the Syrian border into Iraq to wreak havoc there. He never mentions that Syria has taken in 1.5 million people fleeing Iraq. Other countries that have made room for multitudes of displaced Iraqis are Jordan, with 750,000, and Iran with 130,000. Smaller numbers have fled to Kuwait, Turkey and Iran.
The Syrian government estimates that giving these Iraqis room, and enough food and services to keep them alive, costs Syria a billion dollars a year. Their presence puts a strain on an economy in which basic foods and services are subsidized. It’s estimated that only about 35,000 of the 250,000 Iraqi children believed to be in Syria are in school there. Iraqi adults can’t work in Syria, so the situations of Iraqi families become more desperate every day.
The fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world—caused not by some frog-jowled dictator in Africa or torturing hooligan in Asia, but by the United States. How will Iraqi kids stuck in Damascus with no schooling, eating Syrian-subsidized bread, donated Saudi dates and hardly anything else, remember America when they’re big enough to become jihadists? The shortsightedness of our foreign policy is one of the gravest threats to our longterm national security.
