European countries return scores of Iraqi asylum seekers

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Several dozen Iraqis who failed to gain asylum in Europe returned to Iraq on Wednesday despite concerns the country is still too dangerous, the U.N. refugee agency said. Security has dramatically improved in Iraq since the height of sectarian bloodshed in 2006 and 2007, but the UNHCR has urged governments not to force Iraqis who fled the country after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion to return, citing continued attacks and human rights violations. After the plane carrying a batch of deportees landed at Baghdad airport Wednesday afternoon, 10 of the passengers refused to disembark and had to be escorted off the aircraft by police, the Associated Press quoted an Iraqi airport official as saying. The returnees did not resist the security personnel who boarded the plane, but told them they were not returning to Iraq voluntarily, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. The official said all the deportees will be questioned by police before being let into the country. The plane arrived from Stockholm with 27 Iraqi deportees from Sweden, nine from Norway, four from the Netherlands and an unknown number from the United Kingdom, Sybella Wilkes, a UNHCR spokeswoman, told the AP. The Iraqi official said 56 deportees were returned Wednesday from several European countries. Wilkes said in a phone interview that the governments participating in the latest deportation – the fourth such known flight to Iraq in the past two months – provided the U.N. agency with very limited and late information. “We don’t know who they (the deportees) are and which parts of Iraq they are returning to,” Wilkes said. “We’d like to be given information about the people aboard these flights well in advance so that we can determine that none of them is being returned into harm’s way.” SH (S)/SR 1