IRAQ: A house returns to its rightful owner

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In February 2007, Times staff writer Said Rifai wrote about what it was like to have his family’s home ‘housejacked.’ At the time, Baghdad’s neighborhoods were awash in sectarian bloodshed, and his west Baghdad district of Adel was in the hands of Sunni Muslim insurgents and gunmen.

Since then, security has improved in most of the country, and Iraq’s government is urging people to return to homes they fled to escape the war. But that’s not as easy as it sounds. Some people have found their houses still occupied by strangers, who say they have been driven out of their own homes and have nowhere to go. Others are returning to discover their homes in shambles after being occupied by insurgents, militiamen and squatters and caught in gun battles.

The Iraqi government has vowed to impose an orderly system of returns and in some areas at least has warned that if people don’t leave homes they have occupied illegally by Sept. 2, they will be evicted. In Rifai’s neighborhood, the Iraqi military has begun overseeing the handover process, and Rifai was one Adel resident who decided it was time to get his house back. Read about his experience here.

There are wildly varying accounts of how many people have gone home to places they had fled. The government says the number is in the tens of thousands and includes Iraqis returning from abroad. Recently, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki began making his jet available for weekly flights of Iraqis coming back from Egypt.

Whatever the real number, the big question is how people will manage if they return to areas that have been badly damaged in the war and are not equipped to handle population influxes, and whether enough Iraqis are trusting enough in the future to give up their displaced status and go home.

— Tina Susman in Baghdad