Aaron Brown: This is a refugee crisis without the refugee camps. Thousands upon thousands of people just disappeared into cities like this. But the fact that there are no tents or no mud floors doesn’t make them less of a refugee or any less desperate or this any less of a crisis.

In Iraq, Youssef – no refugees’ last names will be used in this film for security reasons – had been a well-off engineer. Here in Jordan, he’s not allowed to work.

He fled Iraq two years ago.

Did you ever imagine in your life you would be a refugee?

Youssef (subtitles): Never. Never. But I’m a refugee now. I’ve been a civil engineer for 32 years. In Baghdad I owned a house and many cars. My journey into exile took it all. When I came I started spending my savings, and now I’m struggling.

Aaron Brown:Do you think your life will ever be good again?

Youssef (subtitles): Maybe for my grandchildren, but not for me or my children. I’m sorry to say, right now the people who are making decisions in Iraq, don’t have work experience, leadership experience or governing experience. The people who understand leadership, know how to lead, and can lead a society have run away from Iraq. We dreamt that democracy would rescue us from the life we had under Saddam Hussein. It was a very, very hard time. Now, when we compare the situation to the time of Saddam Hussein we say, “I wish.” We thought the Americans, who are people of culture, science, and leadership, would show us a type of leadership that’s better than what we had in Saddam Hussein’s time. But what’s happening now is, unfortunately, not what we expected.

Aaron Brown: Iraq’s educated middle class – the very people needed to rebuild after the war – are in exile.

In Jordan, and here in Syria, they are classified not as refugees but as guests, which means no permanent residency and no work permits. Savings run out – poverty sets in.

For five years the official position from governments has been the same: the Iraqis must go home. But five years into the crisis reality is starting to seep in and officials now quietly acknowledge that the two million Iraqis spread out between Jordan and Syria are not going anywhere. They’re here to stay permanently, albeit illegally, presenting their host governments and the people in those countries with a whole new set of problems and challenges.

Jordan’s Queen Noor, the American-born widow of the late King Hussein, was as direct as a public official is likely to be. Unthinkable consequences, she warns, await a world that does nothing to solve this refugee crisis.

Queen Noor: The social exclusion and marginalization of young people as well as their parents, I think, is a very serious problem with potentially dangerous consequences. No one can afford to have a huge number of people feeling alienated and humiliated and desperate and hopeless.

Aaron Brown: People don’t want to think that the consequences of this kind of neglect, but the consequences of hopelessness, are real.

Queen Noor: I believe that in host countries like Syria and Jordan if we are not able to attend to their basic needs and help to instill a sense of hope for the future, we will face an even more uncertain and dangerous future.

Aaron Brown: Are you getting the attention you need from the Western countries, from America?

Queen Noor: The industrialized countries, many feel that United States and Great Britain and others have a special responsibility because it was their policies in Iraq that resulted in these humanitarian consequences. There seem to be a lack of understanding of what the humanitarian consequences might be and what ultimately the political consequences might be of these humanitarian tragedies. It has to be looked at as a…as in all of our interest to insure that it doesn’t further destabilize the region, that is already racked with so much instability, instability that spilled over its borders and outside of this region for far too long now. That I think is, is something I worry about it everyday.

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