A home less loved

In Uppsala, words are strange and the air cold. The fruit is less sweet, too, the winter ice thick and the thrum of bicycles makes an odd music across the cobblestones. Mariam Lutfi attends to these unaccustomed rhythms. There are many like her. They are easily spotted around town, nodding to one another, stopping to talk in their native tongue while carrying notebooks scribbled with a foreign alphabet that has too many sounds for the letter "G".

The call to prayer doesn't warble across the chimneys, the meat isn't slaughtered according to Islamic tradition and finding a glass of strong tea is difficult amid the clatter of lattes and espressos.

"Life is so upside down. I am at zero," said Lutfi, one of hundreds of Iraqi refugees attempting to build a new life in Uppsala. "I can't show anything to anybody here. I keep it inside. And when I go for a walk and there's no one around, I cry and show my nervousness and regret only to myself."

Leaving families and unrelenting sectarian violence behind, they are photographed and fingerprinted, their lives slipped into folders too slim to hold all that has been endured. They wonder about reinvention.

"We have safety and freedom here but our tradition differs so much from the Swedes'," said Amer Mazin, a Palestinian born in Baghdad, who paid a smuggler $13,500 and reached Uppsala in December.

Uneasy exodus

This is life adrift. More than 2 million Iraqis have fled their homeland since the US-led invasion in 2003. Most are living in Syria, Jordan and other Middle Eastern nations. Sweden has offered refugees government aid and generous family-reunification plans for decades. Nearly 9,000 Iraqis, more than half of all those who arrived in Europe from the war-torn country in 2006, made their way to Sweden. European officials estimate that as many as 40,000 more Iraqis may reach the continent this year.

Since the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussain, the United States has taken in 466 Iraqi refugees. Washington has been reluctant to accept them. There have been concerns about mistakenly granting asylum to militants.

Increased violence in Iraq and criticism by human-rights groups, however, appeared to have prompted the White House to announce in February that the US would accept as many as 7,000 Iraqi refugees by the end of this year.

The Bush administration has pledged $18 million - a sum the US military spends in Iraq in less than two hours - to United Nations relief efforts for Iraqi refugees this year.

In comments on the crisis, Bill Frelick, refugee-policy director at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said: "Washington is spending about $2 billion per week on the war in Iraq but has barely begun to address the human fallout from the war."

Paying smugglers as much as $15,000 per person, Iraqi refugees bound for Europe travel with doctored papers and forged passports from different countries. They spend weeks or months waiting in Jordan or Turkey before being hidden in cars and trucks and driven by circuitous routes across the continent. The lucky among them board planes in Amman, the Jordanian capital, or Istanbul, Turkey's main city, and land in Stockholm, where they turn themselves in to immigration officials and apply for asylum.

They have escaped war's devastation but now must navigate the confusing idiosyncrasies of new countries. In Uppsala, a university city threaded by a river, Iraqis attend language classes below a downtown church steeple and then ride buses to neighbourhoods such as Gottsunda, where they wear secondhand clothes and live in boxy brick apartment buildings like the refugees who arrived after the 1991 Gulf War and other conflicts in Africa and the Balkans.

Mazin feels like just another name on a list. His wife and four children remain in a Syrian refugee camp. War has killed or scattered everyone close to him: His mother and a sister are in Baghdad, a brother is in a holding centre on the Iraq-Syria border, two sisters are stuck in Syria, another brother and a sister are in Jordan and one sister made it to Canada. All this happened after June 20, 2005, when a third brother was shot and killed in the family's electrical contracting shop in Baghdad.

Basic desires

Wearing an ironed shirt and a beige jacket, Mazin totes a nylon bag full of papers. He seems like a man going to work, but there is no work for him, not until he learns Swedish. He is awaiting his residency permit and permission to bring his family to Uppsala, which has a population of 180,000 and is about 45 miles northwest of Stockholm. Like other refugees from Iraq, Mazin receives a monthly bus pass and just under $10 a day from the Swedish government.

"I'd like to start a heating and cooling business," said Mazin, who prays in his bedroom because there is no mosque in his neighbourhood. "But mainly I just want to get my family and live in peace. It's hard to concentrate on learning a new language when I worry about them. I know Iraq is going from bad to worse. It will split along sectarian lines. There's no solution. But my passion and my heart are there."