Refugees Iraq

Seven Iraqi refugees, including a pregnant woman, were killed Friday when relief crates dropped by Western planes fell on their tents along the Turkish border, camp supervisor Basri Tay said. Tay, an Iraqi, runs a camp holding an estimated 50,000 refugees on a mountain plateau just inside Iraq. The casualties could not be confirmed independently. Journalists returning from a visit to the camp said they saw at least four wooden crates that hit tents. A U.S. spokesman at Incirlik Air Base, Col.

Nearly 250 Palestinian refugees fleeing violence and death threats in Iraq arrived in Syria on Tuesday, after most had been stranded for weeks in a desert border area because Jordan refused to admit them. The Palestinians said their community in Iraq was being targeted by armed groups -- although some said they were fleeing general instability. "Every Palestinian in Iraq is targeted.

Adnan Mohammed stood warming his hands around a smoky fire scraped together on the floor of an abandoned bus station. Beside him, his wife cradled their toddler in a scarf splotched with the blood of their 12-year-old son, hit by American gunfire last week. The wife stood without shoes in the swirling mud on the floor of the station.

On the grounds of the Haifa Sports Club in central Baghdad, 250 Palestinian families live in a tent camp, sweltering in heat that exceeds 125 degrees. The camp's residents are mostly women, children and elderly people. To drink, they must haul water from distant faucets. Mothers complain that their children can't sleep because of the heat, and the frightening rattle of gunfire during the night.

The massive allied bombardment of the Iraqi city of Basra has demolished every communications center in that strategic southern city, all major oil refineries, most government buildings, some civilian neighborhoods and hundreds of ammunition depots and food warehouses, according to eyewitnesses. The result: a hellish nightmare of fires and smoke so dense that the witnesses say the sun hasn't been clearly visible for several days at a time.

Optimism is beginning to color analysis of the Kurdish refugee crisis at major Western embassies here, but allied troops may have to remain in northern Iraq far longer than originally planned, diplomatic sources said Wednesday. A month after more than 2 million mostly Kurdish refugees began their panic flight from Iraq, crisis managers now believe that the elements of a solution are at last falling into place.

More than 200 Bangladeshis and Somalians who fled Iraq have arrived in Iran and have been housed in refugee camps, the news agency IRNA reported. It added that 500 Vietnamese are waiting at the Iraqi border, across from the Iranian town of Khosrowvi, for permission to enter.

More than 5,000 refugees from war-torn Iraq remained trapped Sunday at the Jordanian border, enduring bitter cold on the open desert. Snow fell overnight, and puddles were sheeted with ice on the fifth day since Iraqi officials, without warning or explanation, closed the border crossing point. The few refugees who were permitted to cross into Jordan told reporters that stranded families were sleeping in cars and buses and some were taking shelter under the vehicles.

Shell-shocked and half-frozen, hundreds of war-weary refugees began pouring across the Iraqi border here Monday, after remaining nearly a week with little food and no shelter at a desert frontier crossing that Iraqi authorities had closed without explanation six days earlier.

Financially pressed Jordan closed its border with Iraq to war-frightened refugees Wednesday, demanding more Western money to help handle the flow. Interior Ministry Undersecretary Salameh Hammad said the frontier will be reopened once "a repatriation program is put forward by international organizations and world governments to airlift all evacuees home," the official Petra news agency reported.

He arrived in America just three days before terrorists struck on Sept. 11. Immediately after landing at Miami International Airport, Doraid Joussef Suleiman declared himself a refugee from the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The 18-year-old's hope was to join much of the rest of his family already living in the United States. Suleiman told U.S.

A two-week standoff ended when the last of more than 200 refugees agreed to leave an Australian navy ship and be taken to the remote Pacific nation of Nauru. The mainly Iraqi refugees abandoned demands to be taken to Australia and left the Manoora. The ship had picked them up off Australia days after a separate group of mainly Afghan asylum seekers was put aboard under an agreement to end an earlier standoff.

Six U.S. residents returned home Thursday to hugs and cheers from relatives after being held for more than a week in a Mexican jail on charges of providing illegal help to Iraqi Christians seeking asylum. Relatives rushed to greet them as they walked across the border crossing that links San Diego and Tijuana. "We were innocent," Kathy Barno of El Cajon said. "We have done nothing wrong and I'm glad I'm back home with my family."

More than 200 Iraqi Christians, including 133 who were detained by Mexican police in Tijuana last week, were safe on U.S. soil Wednesday as immigration officials processed their asylum applications. Their journey is turning out a lot happier than that of many who pay smugglers to get them to a new life in the United States. Chinese groups are regularly captured off the Baja California coast and sent home--at U.S. expense--without setting foot in the United States.

More than 1,700 Iraqi Christians crowded into separate church services Sunday to celebrate the release of 46 Iraqi immigrants from U.S. custody and call for the release of others being detained in Mexico. "It is difficult to describe it," said 28-year-old Mufeed Yousif, one of 16 Chaldean Christians released by Immigration and Naturalization Service officials Saturday.

An unusual immigration drama unfolded Wednesday, as 45 people identifying themselves as Iraqi Christians crossed the Mexican border at San Ysidro and turned themselves in to U.S. immigration officials in an apparent bid for political asylum. Meanwhile, a larger group of would-be immigrants was held by Mexican authorities in a Tijuana hotel. Officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service said the detainees identified themselves as Chaldean.

A growing fear that thousands of Iraqi refugees under allied protection will be slaughtered when U.S. troops go home will not affect plans to remove most American forces as rapidly as possible, Administration officials said Monday. Pentagon officials said the United States will not assume responsibility for the safety of an estimated 25,000 Iraqi civilians who fled their homes in southern Iraq as loyalist forces systematically crushed an insurgency.

U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, yielding to the Bush Administration, announced Friday that U.N. relief teams will take over the Kurdish refugee camps in northern Iraq from American troops "as soon as possible." At first, the secretary general implied that it is only "a question of days" before the takeover, but he later backed off under questioning by reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York. He said he is sending U.N.

Four days after ordering six Iraqis deported as threats to U.S. national security, an immigration judge in Los Angeles on Friday granted political asylum to a 47-year-old Kurdish journalist from northern Iraq, the man's attorney said. Judge D.D. Sitgraves found that Hashim Hawlery would likely face persecution if returned to his homeland, said lawyer Niels Frenzen.

Relying on secret information from FBI agents and other government officials, a U.S. immigration judge in Los Angeles has ordered the deportation of six Iraqi exiles who say they were involved in a failed 1996 coup attempt against Saddam Hussein. Judge D.D. Sitgraves found Monday that the six "pose security risks to the United States," though the basis of her ruling remained largely concealed in a 92-page decision that is off limits even to defense attorneys.