According to an article on ABC News, many of the refugees fled the al-Tash refugee camp in Iraq’s western Anbar governorate in January 2005 following clashes between rebels and U.S. occupation forces there. Because Jordan refuses to let them into the country, they are struck in a lawless no man’s desert land, which is prone to harsh weather conditions and isn’t under any governmental jurisdiction.

The refugees are Iranian Kurds. Most left Iran in 1982, or were born in Iraq. They lived in a refugee camp about 90 miles from Baghdad before the 2003 U.S. invasion. But after the fall of Baghdad, they received threats.

"I saw about 20 armed men with their faces covered," Abdullah Hassan Zadeh told Human Rights Watch in May 2003. "We tried to confront them, but they threatened us with their weapons and told us to go away."

About 1,100 of the Iranian Kurds escaped Iraq right after the invasion. Others tried to remain in the war-torn country. But eventually, they realized that they must flee the violence. In January 2005, about 190 of these Kurds decided to leave Iraq for Jordan. But the attempts of the group stranded at the border weren’t successful. When they arrived at the Jordan-Iraq border, Amman had already accepted many refugees onto its soil. 

At a press briefing in April 2006, Jordanian government spokesman Nasser Judeh told reporters that Amman had reached its threshold for refugees, according to the Jordan Times. "Iraq is surrounded by five countries," he says. "I find it very strange that the emphasis is on Jordan to open up its borders to anybody and everybody."

And so the group found themselves stranded in the middle of the desert, where they have been living for the past 16 months. About half of the refugees are children. Beside the few donations that the refugees receive from time to time, no one provides them with any food, water, medicines or shelter. Their children can't go to school. Windstorms tear apart their tents and expose them to the harsh weather conditions, especially in the winter.

Marcy Newman, an American researcher living in Amman who visited the camp twice, shot some photos that show partially collapsing makeshift tents. "Some of the tents are made out of scrap cardboard and things like that," she says.

In addition to their terrible living conditions, the refugees also feel unsafe living close to the country they escaped. "Really, it is a lawless area," says Bill Frelick, Human Rights Watch refugee policy director. "It is a highly dangerous, insecure area because you don't have rule of law there… When you're inside a country, you always have the hope to at least be integrated locally, or to be resettled to another country," says Frelick.

"But if you're in a no man's land you're really just in limbo."

In an attempt to resolve the issue, the group was offered a resettlement in the Kawa refugee camp in the northern Iraqi governorate of Erbil which has been set up in September 2005 following an agreement between the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Vandana Patel, UNHCR Iraq protection officer in Amman, says that there are 1,300 Iranian refugees living in the Erbil camp who receive appropriate assistance provided by UNHCR and the local authorities.

"They will have access to education for their children," says UNHCR representative Robert Breen. "They will have access to health for all members of their family. The men will have access to employment."

But the refugees fear that going back to any part of war-torn Iraq would endanger their lives by putting them at risk of violence that made them escape the country in the first place. "We refuse the UNHCR proposal to move us to northern Iraq," says Mohammadi. "About 65 of us came from there, and we all know it’s not a safe place."

The refugees hope that time could help their cause. But UNHCR and the Jordanian government insist the group could remain in this no man’s land for 40 years and they still wouldn't be allowed into the Promised Land. "[The camp in Iraq] may not be the solution that they prefer," says Breen. "But I'm afraid it's the only solution that's been available to them."

But the no man’s land refugees insist that they wouldn’t even consider the UNHRC solution. "We only want to live like humans," says Mohammedi. "If we die at the border it is better than to die in the north of Iraq."