Government spokesman Ali Dabbagh played down such concerns. At a news conference late last month, he said nobody was being forced to come back and that the government was "doing its best" to protect those who did.
Determining how many people have returned is impossible, and skeptics accuse the government of exaggerating figures to make it appear that all is well in a still turbulent country. Dabbagh said that 60,000 people had returned from Syria alone in the last month. The Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration says that since October, an additional 10,000 Iraqi families displaced within the country have registered or are in the process of registering for benefits to return to their hometowns.
The numbers are a small fraction of the estimated 4.2 million people international organizations say have been uprooted since the start of the war in 2003, but they are enough to worry high-ranking U.S. military officials.
Army Col. Bill Rapp, a senior aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the U.S. mission in Iraq, said a concern to the military was how to handle the situation if returnees find squatters in their homes.
"The Iraqi government has not published a policy on what happens when your house is occupied by someone else," Rapp said. "They want these guys to come back, but they haven't yet figured out the mechanism for reestablishing people."
He said U.S. forces had been "pleading" with the Iraqi government to come up with a policy so that American troops aren't asked to sort out property disputes.
Saba al Bor offers myriad examples of the challenges of bringing Iraqis home.
Kareem, 55, reaches the end of the road, passes a small grove of trees and pushes open the broken metal door into her courtyard.
The once-comfortable house she shared with her two sons and their families is a shambles. The windowpanes are gone. The doors have been wrenched from their hinges. Dishes, lamps and anything else that could be broken lie in tiny pieces on the floor. Charred paint is peeling from the walls, ceiling and staircase. Only a refrigerator and a TV, shattered and partially melted from an arsonist's attempt to burn down the house, are evidence that a family once lived here.
"There is nothing left. It is a total loss," the Shiite woman said after her Nov. 17 visit to the house. "For now, I'm hopeless," she added, explaining that 1 million dinars was not nearly enough to make the place habitable.
