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Iranians Find Tenuous Refuge in Syria

[Christian Science Monitor] Rania Abouzeid - The young Iranian thought he would find a safe haven among his fellow Sunni Arabs in Damascus. He's a young political leader who belongs to the small Ahwaz ethnic minority in Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, where local activists contend that for decades they have been forcibly uprooted by Iran's Shiite government. But, now, as a result of the strengthening alliance between Iran and Syria, he's worried that he and about 250 Ahwazi refugees will become the little noticed casualties of the anti-Western axis forming in the Middle East. Five of his political activist friends were nabbed by Syrian security services in early March. If he's sent back to Iran, he says, he could be killed. He received the death penalty in absentia after fleeing Iran in December 2005. The five Ahwazis seized on March 5 this year were the second batch to be detained by Syrian authorities in the past year. According to Syria's National Organization for Human Rights, five others were arrested in May 2006 and handed over to Iranian authorities. "That should never have happened," says Laurens Jolles, UNHCR representative in Damascus. "It was clear they were refugees sent back to an uncertain fate." Forbidden from speaking Arabic, the Ahwazi population of Khuzestan Province is one of the most economically and socially deprived in Iran, according to Amnesty International.
2007-05-18 01:00:00
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