By Wisam Mohammed
BAGHDAD, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Encouraged by the lull in the bloodletting in their homeland, Iraqis are beginning to trickle home, desperate to escape the financial hardships that exile has imposed, but most are still too fearful to return.
"There is nothing sweeter than being in Iraq. I will not leave again," says 70-year-old grandmother Saadiya Tawfik, whose family struggled to make ends meet after fleeing to neighbouring Syria with more than a million other Iraqis.
International aid agencies say the number of people being displaced in Iraq still exceeds the number of returnees. Displacement and Migration Minister Abdul Samad Sultan told Reuters about 1,600 people were returning to Iraq every day.
The government has been keen to highlight the number of families coming back to show that a nine-month-old U.S.-Iraqi military campaign to quell sectarian violence is working.
But anecdotal evidence suggests there is a push-pull factor at work.
Iraqis are certainly coming home because of improved security, but equally they are being pushed out of the countries that have taken them in. Unable to find jobs, many Iraqis, even those considered well-off, have become impoverished in exile.
Iraq is now at a crossroads after savage violence between majority Shi'ites and Sunni Arabs killed tens of thousands, displaced more than a million people and sent millions more fleeing abroad in an exodus of Biblical proportions.
Many of the 2 million Iraqi refugees abroad, who are mainly in Syria and Jordan, are waiting to make sure that the downturn in violence is not simply a lull but a "long-term phenomenon", says the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
FINANCIAL HELP
"All Iraqis are convinced that the withdrawal of the U.S. army will spark a civil war," said Ala'a al-Tememi, 47, a Shi'ite engineer in the Ministry of Industry who returned home to Baghdad after fleeing to Iraq's more stable Kurdish north.
Tememi is cutting the grass in his overgrown garden in Ghazaliya, a mainly Sunni district in west Baghdad that he left in July after motorbike-riding gunmen killed his brother.
"The killing frightened my family and we decided to go north to Arbil. I couldn't speak any Kurdish, which is important to work there. We suffered a lot until I found a job with a foreign company. We found security but lost our comfort," he said.
He is not easily persuaded the violence is over. He believes the drop in bloodshed is only being sustained by a massive security presence in Baghdad that cannot last forever.
Minister Sultan says the government is offering financial help to returning families. About 4,000 families have each received 1 million dinars (about $800), while 4,650 more are still waiting for the payments to be processed.
"Prime Minister Maliki has also ordered us to pay the costs of trips for families who want to return home from neighbouring states by plane and cars," he said in an interview.
"We have talked with the embassies and Iraqi airlines to register the names of people who want to return home," he said.
"DEATH'S BROTHER"
Falih Mohammed, a 40-year-old Sunni Arab university professor, has returned home to Sha'ab, a mainly Shi'ite district in northern Baghdad after fleeing a year ago to live in Egypt, which has taken in up to 70,000 Iraqis.
He was prompted to leave Iraq by the kidnapping of his brother and his son at a fake checkpoint. Although the pair were later released, the incident persuaded him it was time to move.
"We suffered in Egypt, having to move house all the time. I decided to return home after a friend told me the university was going to dismiss me because I was not attending lectures and I had exceeded my one-year holiday time," Mohammed said.
"I was not convinced about staying in Baghdad, but after returning to my district, I found many things had changed, like checkpoints and more security forces. Now I remember the moments of homelessness outside Iraq. Travelling is death's brother."
While Mohammed and Tememi have gone back to neighbourhoods where their sect is not in a majority, that is unusual. According to the IOM most are returning to homogenised areas.
Abu Naseem, 66, is a retired Sunni police officer who returned home in September to Hay al-Khansaa, a predominantly Shi'ite neighbourhood in east Baghdad, after fleeing to Syria following the bombing of a revered Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 that sparked the wave of sectarian violence.
Watching workers painting his home, he said: "After all this effort to fix the house I hope there will be no more fighting. But I think the violence will be back again."
(Additional reporting by Ross Colvin and Yasser Faisal, Editing by Matthew Jones)