WHEN Ahmed Kadoura arrived in Iraq 55 years ago as a five-year-old refugee, his first home was a ragged tent in a camp for Palestinians fleeing the fighting in the new Jewish state.

Now greying and grizzled, he has, with the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, found himself sheltering under the canvas of a tent once more, an outcast again in his adopted land. “I was kicked out with my mother and father 55 years ago. Now I’ve been kicked out with my own family,” Mr Kadoura said, mournfully rubbing his unshaven chin as he sipped a glass of sweet tea.

“We are going round in circles.”

The Kadoura family are one of more than 300 Palestinian families sheltering in a makeshift camp on a football field in Baghdad after being driven out of their homes by former friends and neighbours.

The fall of the Baathists has unleashed Iraqi rage against a minority seen as beneficiaries of and collaborators with the regime of Saddam Hussein, who presented himself as the greatest regional champion of the Palestinian cause. Seeking to cast himself as a pan-Arab hero, Saddam devoted substantial resources to their cause, forming a militia aimed at freeing Jerusalem from Jewish rule, rewarding the families of Palestinian suicide-bombers, aiding the setting-up of training camps on Iraqi soil and recruiting prominent Palestinians into his feared security service.

For many of the estimated 35,000 Palestinian refugees, the support came in the form of free housing and healthcare denied to the general populace, benefits that caused huge resentment in a country enduring damaging sanctions. Many Palestinians joined the ruling Baath party, aware of the tacit deal being offered.

“There’s a resentment because they were given preferential treatment,” said Peter Bouckaert, of Human Rights Watch, based in New York, which is monitoring the Palestinians’ plight. “Anyone who hates Saddam in Iraq has turned their hatred on the Palestinians.”

Three days after Baghdad fell to the Americans last month, Mr Kadoura was visited by a man he had never met, the owner of the home he had lived in for 15 years, provided to him free of charge under government aid for Palestinians.

“He came and told us we had three days to get out. ‘After that I’ll bring people to throw you out. Any government that is coming or has been — I don’t give a s*** about them,’ ” the owner had told Mr Kadoura.

The family started packing immediately, but for another neighbour, their departure was not fast enough. A Shia, a member of the minority most persecuted by Saddam’s regime, attacked Mr Kadoura at his front gate with a ceremonial knife, stabbing him three times in the chest.

As he was taken to hospital, his wife and four sons quickly packed up their belongings and rushed to a swelling encampment at the Haifa Club Football ground, where scores of other Palestinian families driven out from their homes were sheltering in hastily erected tents. Hundreds more had already fled to a camp across the Jordanian border for fear of further persecution in Iraq.

It is not the first time that Palestinian refugees have fallen foul of the shifting sands of Iraqi politics. Kuwait and Qatar threw out their Palestinian populations just before the 1991 Gulf War in punishment for the declared support for Saddam by Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

Human rights activists fear that another such purge may have begun and have called on the occupying American-led force to provide protection for the minority, an obligation under the Geneva Convention. Yet the exodus is continuing.

“We are getting more and more each day,” Abdul Yousef, the director of the camp said. “They are coming from as far away as Ramadi.”

Mr Kadoura’s neighbours might have thought him privileged. He did not. “We were never allowed to take citizenship, to own a house — not even a car,” he said. “We were given benefits, but it was a still a hard life.”

Now that life is even harder and less certain, he is no longer prepared to rely on the favour of others. For him, facing the second expulsion of his life, the experience serves only to underline the need for a permanent settlement to a problem that has remained unsolved throughout his exile: the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Without that, the Palestinian people will always be reliant on the favour of others and the deals they may have to make to gain it.

“It’s pointless to stay in any Arab country,” Mr Kadoura said. “The point is to go home. I would walk naked to go back there.”

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