Wednesday, October 11, 2006
300,000 Iraqis displaced since start of war
Security
The six-month wave of Sunni-Shiite killings has fueled the flight of Iraqis from their homes. Iraq's Immigration Minister Abdul-Samad Sultan said more than 300,000 Iraqis have been displaced since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Half of them, he said, fled their homes after the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra that sparked waves of violence. Those displaced mostly moved in with their own sectarian communities - Shiites fleeing mainly Sunni or mixed areas to Shiite-dominated ones, and vice versa -exacerbating the segregation of the country of some 30 million. Some 890,000 Iraqis have moved to Jordan, Iran and Syria since 2003, Sultan said.
