Kirk W. Johnson: Left Behind in Iraq
[Kirk W. Johnson is the founder and executive director of the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies. He previously served as regional coordinator for reconstruction in Fallujah, Iraq, for the U.S. Agency for International Development. This article was adapted from a version previously published on the List Project's website.]
America is leaving Iraq. We already itch to forget. The U.S. media gave more coverage to the elections in Zimbabwe than those held in March across Iraq. We award Oscars to films about Iraq, but don't particularly care to watch them. The seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion passed recently, with little notice.
Another regrettable anniversary recently passed, one from which U.S. President Barack Obama might take heed. The fall of Saigon 35 years ago marked the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of a seismic refugee crisis. An eleventh-hour request for $722 million to evacuate the thousands of South Vietnamese who had assisted the United States went unfunded by a war-weary Congress. What ensued in those early morning hours on the rooftops of Saigon, as desperate Vietnamese clamored beneath departing helicopters, would be the war's final image seared into the American conscience. Al Jazeera rebroadcast these scenes of abandonment throughout 2005, when I worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Baghdad and Fallujah. My Iraqi colleagues who risked their lives to help us were demoralized by the footage, and constantly worried about what would happen to them when we left.
Since my return, I have been trying to help thousands of Iraqis who fled the assassin's bullet. They have been tortured, raped, abducted, and killed because they worked for America. My organization, The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, assists these imperiled Iraqis in navigating the straits of the winding U.S. refugee resettlement bureaucracy. Although it is the largest single list in existence of U.S.-affiliated Iraqis, at several thousand names, our list is only a reflection of a much larger community. Estimates vary, but between 50,000 to 70,000 Iraqis have been employed by the United States over the past seven years. It is likely that thousands have already been killed as "traitors" or "agents" of America. (I have a separate list documenting hundreds of assassinated interpreters who worked for just one contractor, a small but gruesome glimpse.) And while I once thought that the dark years of Iraq's 2006-2008 civil war were the bleakest for these Iraqis, I am increasingly concerned that the worst days are yet ahead.
The U.S. military is now aggressively redeploying from Iraq and will have pulled half of its 100,000 troops out by the end of August. Lt. Gen. WilliamWebster, who commands the U.S. 3rd Army, reflected on the historic dimension of the logistics operation in March: "Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now." Tens of thousands of troops have been reassigned to this effort, which will dismantle hundreds of bases in the coming months. The military's logistic experts have planned it out so well, they say, that they can even track a coffee pot on its journey from Baghdad to Birmingham.
Impressive as this might be, it ignores a fundamental oversight in the Obama administration's vaunted withdrawal strategy: There are no serious contingency plans to evacuate the thousands of Iraqis who've worked for the United States and live alongside U.S. troops and civilian officials as interpreters, engineers, and advisors. When the U.S. military shutters its bases, these Iraqis will be cut loose to run the resettlement gauntlet, which typically takes a year or more...
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
America is leaving Iraq. We already itch to forget. The U.S. media gave more coverage to the elections in Zimbabwe than those held in March across Iraq. We award Oscars to films about Iraq, but don't particularly care to watch them. The seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion passed recently, with little notice.
Another regrettable anniversary recently passed, one from which U.S. President Barack Obama might take heed. The fall of Saigon 35 years ago marked the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of a seismic refugee crisis. An eleventh-hour request for $722 million to evacuate the thousands of South Vietnamese who had assisted the United States went unfunded by a war-weary Congress. What ensued in those early morning hours on the rooftops of Saigon, as desperate Vietnamese clamored beneath departing helicopters, would be the war's final image seared into the American conscience. Al Jazeera rebroadcast these scenes of abandonment throughout 2005, when I worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Baghdad and Fallujah. My Iraqi colleagues who risked their lives to help us were demoralized by the footage, and constantly worried about what would happen to them when we left.
Since my return, I have been trying to help thousands of Iraqis who fled the assassin's bullet. They have been tortured, raped, abducted, and killed because they worked for America. My organization, The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies, assists these imperiled Iraqis in navigating the straits of the winding U.S. refugee resettlement bureaucracy. Although it is the largest single list in existence of U.S.-affiliated Iraqis, at several thousand names, our list is only a reflection of a much larger community. Estimates vary, but between 50,000 to 70,000 Iraqis have been employed by the United States over the past seven years. It is likely that thousands have already been killed as "traitors" or "agents" of America. (I have a separate list documenting hundreds of assassinated interpreters who worked for just one contractor, a small but gruesome glimpse.) And while I once thought that the dark years of Iraq's 2006-2008 civil war were the bleakest for these Iraqis, I am increasingly concerned that the worst days are yet ahead.
The U.S. military is now aggressively redeploying from Iraq and will have pulled half of its 100,000 troops out by the end of August. Lt. Gen. WilliamWebster, who commands the U.S. 3rd Army, reflected on the historic dimension of the logistics operation in March: "Hannibal trying to move over the Alps had a tremendous logistics burden, but it was nothing like the complexity we are dealing with now." Tens of thousands of troops have been reassigned to this effort, which will dismantle hundreds of bases in the coming months. The military's logistic experts have planned it out so well, they say, that they can even track a coffee pot on its journey from Baghdad to Birmingham.
Impressive as this might be, it ignores a fundamental oversight in the Obama administration's vaunted withdrawal strategy: There are no serious contingency plans to evacuate the thousands of Iraqis who've worked for the United States and live alongside U.S. troops and civilian officials as interpreters, engineers, and advisors. When the U.S. military shutters its bases, these Iraqis will be cut loose to run the resettlement gauntlet, which typically takes a year or more...