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Before CBS' Katie Couric left Syria, she filed a final report from Little Baghdad, the teeming Damascus neighborhood for war refugees. Couric claimed that the dislocation is still enormous "every day thousands of war weary, frightened and desperate Iraqis stream across the border into Syria"--an estimate that seems high, since even if her daily "thousands" were as low as 2,000, that would total 730,000 annually, and the entire refugee population in Syria is just 1.5m after more than four years of war. Yesterday, Couric's (text link) statistic that "hundreds" of Arab suicide bombers have entered Iraq through Damascus seemed similarly high.
Whether or nor her statistics are accurate, Couric chose to illustrate the refugees' plight by focusing on a single Iraqi family of 13, living in a three room apartment, supported by a daily income of $2. Syria denies adult refugees work permits so that pittance comes from the family's eleven-year-old son's street peddling. "In a sad twist, with their welcome worn out here and increasingly desperate, many Iraqis are now boarding buses to go back to the chaos and violence of their homeland."
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