The young Iraqi man shoots a furtive glance over one shoulder as he crosses a back street in Amman, anxious to avoid the gaze of nearby police.

He meets an Iraqi friend waiting in the shadow of a shop front. They exchange greetings before ducking into a small internet café to spend another futile day e-mailing UN agencies and British officials for help that has yet to materialise.

Nicknamed “Cheeky Boy” and “Dr No” by British troops in southern Iraq, the two men are former interpreters for the UK military who abandoned their jobs and fled to Jordan after a series of death threats from Shia militias.

Like scores of other former interpreters living illegally in Jordan and Syria, they face an uncertain future waiting for the slim chance of asylum through the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), while trying to avoid being deported back to Iraq. There, if identified as having worked for the British, they fear that they may be killed.

Iraq timeline: five years of conflict

From accusations that the weapons of mass destruction dossier had been sexed-up to withdrawal of British troops from Basra

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Adding to the strain and a mounting sense of frustration, appeals for help to the British Government have so far fallen on deaf ears.

“They should not abandon us,” said Cheeky Boy. “They have a moral obligation because we helped them. We tried our best to make their mission in Iraq a success,” the 27-year-old said. His real name is A. Ibrahim, though he fears that its full publication would endanger his parents and four younger siblings in Basra who are a militia target thanks to his old work.

He and Dr No, whose name is N. Abbas, worry that a review of government policy towards Iraqi interpreters could overlook their combined six and a half years of service because they are no longer on the British pay-roll. “We need a quick response,” sighed Mr Ibrahim, as he sat with Mr Abbas in the sparse living room of a flat of a friend who was an interpreter with the US forces.

Mr Ibrahim, who like Mr Abbas exchanges e-mails with supportive British troops, is sceptical about whether he will receive any official help. The Ministry of Defence sent him a demoralising response in March to an e-mail he had sent four months earlier asking whether interpreters would get the same special assistance that the US offers some of its Iraqi staff.

James Sherwin, of the MoD Directorate of Joint Commitments - Iraq, wrote: “I can now confirm that the UK does not offer a similar scheme [to the United States], and has no plans to introduce one.”

Forbidden from working in Jordan because of their status as asylum-seekers, neither of the two men has enough to live and the cash they have borrowed is rapidly running out.

“Life is miserable. There is no work for me and no security. I am constantly afraid to be caught by the Jordanian authorities and sent back to Iraq,” said Mr Abbas. The 24-year-old, whose face is gaunt from surviving on one meal a day, squats in a tiny studio in central Amman, while Mr Ibrahim lives in a shabby hotel room.

The two men are registered with the UNHCR and carry certificates proving that they are asylum-seekers. Unfortunately, they say, these mean little to the police and would unlikely help them if they were ever challenged.

Despite the hardships and bleak prospects, neither man regrets working as an interpreter for the British forces in July 2003. At first, the job was enjoyable, patrolling with soldiers in and around Basra, helping them to communicate with the locals as well as train police and army recruits. Mr Abbas earned special praise by becoming the only interpreter out of 20 to complete a 45-day mission by the Black Watch battle group to deadly terrain south of Baghdad in 2004. A car bomb prompted others to return to Basra.

Gradually, however, the mood in southern Iraq changed as militias – the al-Mahdi Army loyal to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the armed wing of the political Fadhila party – gained strength and influence.

British troops stepped up operations against these groups in 2005, prompting the militias to suspect Iraqi interpreters of revealing information.

“The al-Mahdi Army started to target anyone who spoke English,” said Mr Ibrahim, slim-built, with tired eyes. He and Mr Abbas were particularly at risk because they were among Basra’s small Sunni minority that was also being targeted.

Increasingly, interpreters were kidnapped, tortured and murdered, their bodies sometimes left in the street with a note attached warning others of the fate of working with “infidels”.

The pressure became too much for Mr Abbas. Last year, he said goodbye to his parents and three younger brothers and caught a bus to Baghdad. On April 4, 2006, he took a second bus to Jordan. “That was my first day as an illegal refugee,” he said sadly.

Mr Ibrahim stuck it out a little longer. In May 2006 he moved on to the main British base at Basra airport after threats to his life, only returning home to see his family once a month.

Even that journey became too risky. One evening in August an armed gang attacked his house, telling his family: “Your son is a traitor and a spy and has to be killed.” The following day the whole family fled to Mosul, in northern Iraq, which has a large Sunni community. Mr Ibrahim still felt at risk so he went alone to the Jordanian border, but was prevented from crossing because Jordan had tightened its entry rules. He then had no choice but to return to the military base in Basra.

He lived there from September until December when his mother, who was suffering from cancer, asked him to go with her to Amman for treatment.

Given a three-month residency permit to enter Jordan with his sick parent, Mr Ibrahim had planned to return to his job in Basra but the e-mail from Mr Sherwin at the MoD made him reconsider.

For now, Mr Ibrahim and Mr Abbas, like many other former Iraqi interpreters, continue to play the waiting game in hiding, hoping that one of their pleas – to Britain, the United Nations, the United States and even Australia – is heard.

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