Tikrit, Iraq (BBN)-Tens of thousands of Bangladeshis and Indians who went to Iraq to work find themselves pinned down by conflict.
As Iraqi soldiers clashed with insurgents in the city of Tikrit on Wednesday, Sheikh Belal and dozens of other Bangladeshi migrant workers huddled in a storage depot, trying to stay out of the line of fire, reports The Wall Street Journal.
“We’re as terrified of the government forces as we are of the rebels,” said Belal, speaking by phone.
“The army helicopters are firing at anything that moves. We want to leave, but we can’t.”
The 29-year-old farmer from northeastern Bangladesh went to Iraq last year for a construction job.
As fighting rages between the Iraqi military and the al Qaeda-linked Sunni militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, he and thousands of other workers from Bangladesh, India and Nepal who sought a better life in Iraq are stuck in the middle of the conflict.
Despite Iraq’s instability, large numbers of migrant workers have traveled to the country in recent years, seeking jobs in construction or as nurses and domestic helpers.
India estimates that roughly 10,000 of its nationals are in Iraq; Bangladesh says about 35,000 of its citizens are working there.
India this week called on its citizens to leave the country and sent a navy ship to the Persian Gulf in case escalating violence requires a mass evacuation.
But helping people already caught in conflict zones has been difficult.
In Tikrit, Belal said, he had initially sought refuge in the Tikrit Teaching Hospital, but fled after it came under attack.
He said he and other Bangladeshis were briefly detained by Sunni militants last week before being released and were now sheltering in the storage depot.
“There is no power and we’re running out of food,” he said.
More than 40 Indian nurses were also in the basement of a Tikrit hospital on Tuesday, according to the Indian foreign ministry.
Spokesman Syed Akbaruddin said they were in a “delicate situation,” with firing and bombing in the vicinity of the building.
“We remain hopeful that despite these difficulties we will be able to extricate them from what is an extremely difficult situation,” he said.
Migrant workers said in many cases their passports have been taken by their Iraqi employers, further complicating their efforts to leave the country.
Kapil Singh, 27, said he and about 200 other Indian construction workers building homes in the Iraqi city of Hilla, went “on strike” a week ago demanding that they be allowed to travel back to India.
“We don’t feel safe here,” Singh said by phone from Iraq. “We want to go home before the fighting reaches our doorstep.”
But the company that employs the men has refused to return their passports, he said.
“They’ve been threatening and intimidating us,” he said. Attempts to reach the company for comment were unsuccessful.
P.K. Sharma, a foreign ministry official sent to the Iraqi city of Karbala, said he and his colleagues are trying to persuade Iraqi companies to release the passports of the Indians they employ.
Companies “don’t agree so easily, it is a difficult task,” Sharma said by phone.
“We have to make multiple trips and try and explain to them that these men won’t be productive anyway, so they should be allowed to go home.”
The Indian government is also working to secure the release of 39 Indian workers who were kidnapped in the Iraqi city of Mosul two weeks ago.
Akbaruddin of the foreign ministry said the government is “knocking on all doors, including back doors and trap doors” to achieve a breakthrough.
South Asian countries have scrambled to evacuate their citizens before.
In 2011, both India and Bangladesh mounted large-scale operations to bring migrant workers home from Libya after civil war broke out there.
In Dhaka, Showkat Hossain, a senior official of Bangladesh’s Ministry of Expatriates’ Welfare and Overseas Employment, said the government was monitoring the situation and was “well prepared to evacuate Bangladeshi migrant workers from Iraq as necessary.”
Ministry officials said the Bangladeshi embassy in Baghdad had helped evacuate 51 Bangladeshi workers from the northern Iraqi city of Mosul last month, shortly before it fell to Sunni insurgents, but all of them had refused to return to Bangladesh, preferring to stay elsewhere in Iraq to work.
Belal, the Bangladeshi worker in Tikrit, said he had been told by embassy officials to wait until the fighting stopped before he and the other Bangladeshis could be evacuated.
“It’s just my bad luck,” he said. “All I wanted was peace and security to do my job.”
BBN/SS-03July14-11:00am (BST)
