Bangladesh workers pinned down by conflict in Iraq

As Iraqi soldiers clashed with the jihadists in the northern 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. ‘We’re as terrified of the government forces as we are of the rebels,’ said Belal, speaking by phone. ‘The army helicopters are hovering over and firing at rebels. 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 Sunni militants calling themselves the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, he and thousands of other workers from Bangladesh, India and Nepal who sought a better life in Iraq find themselves 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 as construction workers, 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. 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 had been 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. They were in a ‘delicate situation,’ with firing and bombing near the building, said Indian External Ministry spokesman Syed Akbaruddin. 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 to 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,’ he added. - The Wall Street Journal