Word: passport
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Every Iraqi's flight is a boon for people smugglers. Sweden grants asylum freely, but Iraqi refugees need to get to the country first; for that, they need a fake European passport. Most Iraqis flee first to Jordan; from there smugglers arrange flights to Istanbul, where it is easy to find illegal European Union passports - "red passports," as the Iraqis call them. Thus equipped, it's into the E.U. and on to Sweden. Suad Turky, a 29-year-old Shi'ite religious student from Baghdad, paid a smuggler $10,000 to secure a false passport and a ticket to Stockholm...
Dewachi said the only place where he could receive an acceptable, “G” series passport with certainty was in Iraq’s war-torn capital, Baghdad...
After spending a year in London doing fieldwork for his dissertation on the Iraqi diaspora in Britain, he moved to Montreal to finish writing it and became a permanent resident of Canada in June 2005. According to Dewachi, Canada recognizes his “N” series passport...
Although the Iraqi government has extended the validity of the “N” series until the end of 2007 and Dewachi was granted a visa, his passport was invalid to the State Department as of January...
Saying there was “no way” he could return to Baghdad to obtain a “G” passport and that his entire family had emigrated and couldn’t do it for him, Dewachi is now making efforts to obtain a travel document from the Canadian government that would identify him as “stateless,” and allow him to get the visa stamp to pass into the United States...