Iranians find tenuous refuge in Syria

Political refugees worry about their fate as ties strengthen between Damascus and Tehran.

from the May 8, 2007 edition

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DAMASCUS, Syria - The young Iranian reaches for his Turkish coffee, nervously eyeing patrons in the smoky Damascus cafe.

He's all too aware of his increasingly precarious status in Syria.

When Abu Sana (not his real name) came here a year ago, he thought he would find a safe haven among his fellow Sunni Arabs. 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.

His concerns are not unfounded. Five of his political activist friends were nabbed by Syrian security services in early March. Like Abu Sana, most were students, and all were registered with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) office in Damascus as political asylum-seekers.

Abu Sana, a member of the opposition Ahwazi Liberation Organization, worries that if he's picked up by Syrian police he'll miss his opportunity to be resettled by UNHCR in the US later this year. And 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 exact charges have not been made public.

"I feel like a caged bird that is going to be slaughtered and knows it," he says in hushed tones in a noisy cafe. "I beg the world to protect this bird."

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