Inside Iraq blog: the migrants stranded in Baghdad |

He had dreams of coming to Iraq, making his fortune and migrating to Australia. Instead Manoj Kodithuwakku, 28, a Sri Lankan, is stranded in an overcrowded hangar near a US military base with no money, no job and no way out.

Poorly dressed and desperate, he and hundreds of other men from developing countries who came looking for work are living in pitiful conditions. Yesterday The Times entered one of three pale blue hangars that house foreign workers near Baghdad airport. They are full of men who paid a small fortune to come here and have ended up forgotten and trapped.

In the hangars as many as 400 people cram into the lines of bunk beds. Only a few lavatories are still working. There are regular meals but the men say that the food is not good and they receive only one and a half litres of water a day. Health in the camp is poor, they say, and there is nothing for them to do.

The migrant workers burst angrily on to the street yesterday morning to protest against a Kuwaiti-based catering company that they said had promised them work. They accused Najlaa International Catering Services – a subcontractor to Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a main service provider to the US Defence Department – of failing to pay their salaries and keeping them in inhumane conditions.

The company denies the allegations. “We work to very strict rules. We do not accept people being mistreated or mishandled,” Marwan Rizk, the chief executive officer of Najlaa, told The Times.

The Defence Department hires several companies to provide security and catering services at bases across Iraq. They employ thousands of people from countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Uganda, often through subcontractors who, in turn, use agents to find cheap labour.

The agents charge anyone looking for work a fee to transport them to Iraq, provide accommodation en route and an entry visa in return for a job.

Previous fears of human exploitation within this chain prompted the US military to issue an order in 2006, entitled Trafficking in Persons, which was designed to prevent any form of human-trafficking from taking place.

Two years on, however, and Mr Kodithuwakku and his friends claim to be victims of this trade. They say that they paid agents $2,000-$3,000 to come to Iraq on the promise of jobs that have so far failed to materialise.

“About 95 per cent of people paid money to agents, thousands of dollars in borrowed money. Their families depend on their income,” Mr Kodithuwakku, who has been in Iraq for three months, said. Now they were trapped because they needed work to pay off their debts.

“We are living in inhuman conditions. It is three warehouses . . . There is no proper heating system or ventilation,” he said.

Davidson Peters, 42, also from Sri Lanka, said: “We have been held here, some of us for three to four months, against our wishes . . . They promised us the moon and stars.” Another man shouted out: “It’s like a prison!”

Isha al-Rufaie is the logistics manager in Iraq for Najlaa, which hires agents to recruit workers to come to Baghdad. He said that the trafficking allegation was unfounded. “We are now paying them their salary,” he said, claiming that the men were prone to complain and exaggerate.

KBR, which contracts Najlaa to provide catering services in military dining halls, also emphasised that it did not condone or tolerate unethical or illegal behaviour. All employees and contractors were required to adhere to a strict code of conduct, it said, which included training in identifying human trafficking.

“When KBR becomes aware of potential violations of international laws regarding Trafficking in Persons, we work, within our authority, to remediate the problem and report the matter to proper authorities. KBR then works with authorities to rectify the matter,” the company said in a statement.

Mr Rizk said that the three hangars were fine for a conflict zone and dismissed the workers’ claims. “It’s a hotel,” he told The Times in a telephone interview. “We provide them with meals, advances, hygiene kits. They have accommodation, clothing, medical care.”

He added that the men were free to join any other company they wanted. They were merely advised to stay in the compound, on a vast, secure zone around the airport that is also home to a US military base, because of the kidnap threat in Iraq.

Mr Rizk blamed the delay in the men being able to start work on security matters because each one had to be cleared by the US military to work on its bases. He also cited “issues within the camp”, without specifying what they were.

The workers should only start receiving a salary once they had begun work, he added, but in this case he said that he would give them back-pay from the moment of their arrival in the country.

If life in the hangars is fraught, down the road is a group of makeshift huts of wooden planks and sodden blankets, which is home to about 50 Nepalese men.

Here dreams of a better life are well and truly broken. “We have no money, no food, no toilet, no water, no job,” said Ganesh Kumar Bhagat, 22, “Nobody should come to Iraq.”

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