Mustafa Kadir from Raniyah in northern Iraq is so convinced that he will face certain death if he is returned to Irag that he has gone on hunger strike in Harmondsworth detention centre, West London.
The Times reported that he had fled Iraq in 2001 after being targeted by islamists because his photography shop took business from the Iraqi Communist Party.
His asylum appeal was rejected a year after he arrived, though he was granted a work permit and was working in Callington, Cornwall.
On August 4 he went to a Plymouth police station to notify them he was moving and was told to return the following week.
When he did so he was arrested and told he was to be sent back to Iraq. He was sent first to Tinsley House near Gatwick, then to Colnbrooke near Oxford and then finally to Harmonsworth.
He said "This is a prison and we don't know why they are treating us like this. We are all human beings"
"We have all been living happily in this country and many of us will be killed if we are returned to Iraq. I cannot go back". SE LET Hime TheR WITH I5 ? veR
rational assessment would agree with that. Even the Foreign Office website recommends against travel to Iraq for British citizens.
The war in Iraq is gradually spreading into Kurdistan, there have been several fatal bomb attacks in Erbil itself, interethnic warfare could break out in neighbouring oil-rich Kirkuk at any time, and the attempts to agree a constitution for Iraq may end with a deepening of the war and the break up of Iraq.
And apart from the dangers of the present war, there is the legacy of the 2003 invasion and previous conflicts in terms of millions of unexploded landmines and Sevelc contamination by depleted uranium.
And while there is less open conflict in the Kurdish area than in Iraq proper, it is most definitely not safe for people who have had problems with the PUK or KDP or with right-wing Islamist organisations, as is the case with most of the people who have been refused asylum here. So why is the Home Office trying to send people back now? On a practical level, they want to meet their deportation targets and be seen to be tough. Second, reducing the Kurdish population in Europe may well have been agreed as part of ongoing secret discussions about
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Veronica Fagan Asylum seekers are already treated as second-class citizens, left to try to survive on seventy per cent of the deportation fears Blair flouts international law
poverty level benefit, income support and forcibly dispersed across the country - away from what support networks their communities STATIONS