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Twice as Many Iraqi Refugees in Södertälje as in the United States
Posted by george on 23rd September 2007
From the “Toronto Globe and Mail”:
Arabic is the lingua franca here in Ronne, a working-class suburb of Sodertalje, an industrial town a short drive south of Stockholm. Across the street from where the Merzoians are walking with their children, a group of a dozen school kids boots a soccer ball around a dusty pitch. All of them speak in Arabic; many of them are, like the Merzoians, recent arrivals from Iraq.
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Its residents refer to Ronne as “Little Baghdad,” the European press somewhat more derisively as “Mesopotalje.” The town is famous from Baghdad to London because of an unlikely statistic – it absorbed about 1,100 Iraqis in 2006, twice as many as the entire United States. And it’s on pace to do the same again this year.
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Sodertalje, and the sight of Iraqi kids happily playing soccer in a safe environment, is a bright light that illuminates a dark truth about the Iraq war: The West, most conspicuously the countries that instigated the crisis by invading Iraq more than four years ago, has turned its back on the innocent civilians fleeing the inferno.
globeandmail.com: Part 1: Growing threat of a displaced nation.
Posted in Sweden, Mid East/Terrorism | No Comments »