Iraqi Refugees Turn To Gangs Across The Globe

International Herald Tribune Caroline Brothers July 26, 2007 03:46 PM
LYON: A criminal matrix stretching from Poland to Guatemala is exploiting the vast wave of refugees who are fleeing the war in Iraq, Interpol says.
Officials here at the world's international police organization maintain that the hand of a criminal gang was evident in the arrests in Mexico of a group of 11 Iraqis who were trying to enter the United States.
The nine men, a woman and a child - traveling as Cypriots and Poles, but in fact Iraqis - were picked up in northern Mexico. The group was headed for an Iraqi Christian community in San Diego and traveling on false passports, officials at Interpol said.
Their journey last winter, the officials said, was proof of a new front for people smugglers, who attract desperate clients from among the estimated two million Iraqis who have fled a nation where the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says violence claims an average of 100 lives a day.
Refugees have fled into Jordan and Syria, Iraq's neighbors, and are now spreading around the globe. At a meeting in Amman on Thursday to discuss the refugee crisis, Iraq's deputy foreign minister, Mohammad al-Haj Hamoud, asked that its neighbors help the Iraqi refugees "until they can return."
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