European Diary:The two middle-aged Iraqi women are watching al-Jazeera television. Sitting in their dingy room in a centre for asylum-seekers in Nijmegen, they are following news reports of the latest car-bombing to bring slaughter to the streets of Baghdad.
"My brother was killed in the streets in the fighting," says one of the women, who does not want to give her name. "My daughter has made it to Jordan, but my mother and father are dead . . . there is no hope for Iraq now. It has too many problems."
But, having escaped to Europe, the women, one from Mosul and one from Baghdad, are in a better situation than many. The vast majority of the two million people who fled Iraq since the war began in 2003 are living in very difficult conditions in Jordan, Syria and Iran. A further 1.7 million are estimated to have migrated to safer areas inside the war-ravaged country, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
"We are facing a humanitarian disaster," warned UN refugee chief António Guterres on a recent visit to Syria. "Until recently, when Iraq was discussed or covered in the media, the focus was on the military and political situation, not on the displacement problem. But now that's changing. The problem is so big it cannot be ignored."
Until last week the EU and US were doing a pretty good job of sidestepping the refugee crisis. Just 20,000 refugees have made the difficult trip through the Middle East to claim asylum in Europe since 2003. In contrast, the Bush administration has let in only 463 Iraqi refugees since it began its campaign to remove Saddam Hussein.
At a justice ministers' meeting in Brussels last week Sweden forced the issue on to the agenda by asking EU states to take joint responsibility for Iraq's refugees.
"Sweden can help many people, but Sweden cannot help everyone," said the country's minister for migration, Tobias Billström. "There must be solidarity between EU states so that more of us share the responsibility for offering protection to refugees . . . It is important to be prepared in case the situation in Iraq deteriorates further."
Sweden, which already has an Iraqi population of about 70,000, fears a deluge of asylum requests in the coming months. A total of 9,065 Iraqis sought asylum there last year - with 3,000 arriving in November and December alone. This compares with 2,330 in the previous year. More than 80 per cent of Iraqi asylum requests since January 2006 have been approved.
The situation for Iraqi asylum-seekers in other EU states is not so rosy. Britain rejected 1,675 out of 1,835 asylum requests from Iraq in 2005, according to Home Office statistics. It also continues to forcibly return failed asylum-seekers to certain parts of Iraq. Last week, 38 Iraqis were deported from RAF Brize Norton to Kurdistan in northern Iraq. The British government says that this area is safe even though the UN says that repatriation should only occur on a voluntary basis.
The number of Iraqi asylum-seekers arriving in the Republic is relatively low, but there is also an official reluctance to grant asylum. According to statistics from the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner, 412 Iraqis have claimed asylum in the Republic since 2003. Some 294 requests have been refused at initial recommendation, while just 118 people have been granted refugee status.
This reluctance in Europe to grant refugee status or accept some of the refugees living in Jordan or Syria is causing concern among refugee agencies, many of which accuse states with troops in Iraq, such as Britain and Denmark, of double standards.
"Germany, which holds the EU presidency, has revoked the refugee status of some 18,000 Iraqis since 2004, merely tolerating their presence and leaving them no means to support themselves. In Denmark and the UK, Iraqis who have been refused asylum are similarly destitute," says Bjarte Vandvik, general secretary of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE).
"When European states go as far as sending soldiers to fight for security, democracy and human rights in Iraq, it would be a paradox if the same states then denied protection to the people of Iraq who flee the country because they feel insecure and threatened . . . But the truth is it is a numbers game. They don't really want lots of Iraqis coming here."
The US, which has come under considerable pressure over its failure to respond to the refugee crisis in Iraq, said last week that it would accept 7,000 Iraqi asylum-seekers and provide $18 million to UNHCR efforts to manage the crisis. But it remains to be seen if Sweden's efforts to start a debate in Europe will force a change in policy.