Aaron Brown: Good evening and welcome to Wide Angle. I'm Aaron Brown and we will report to you tonight from Amman, the capital of Jordan.

There’s much we can argue about where the Iraq war is concerned, but we can’t argue about this – millions of Iraqis now live as refugees because of the war. Hundreds of thousands have come here to Jordan and many many more ended up in Syria, a few hours away, and we’ll take you there too tonight.

By my thinking it’s the most under-reported story of the war because the consequences won’t be appreciated for years to come.

They were some of Iraq's best educated people – its lawyers and its doctors, its teachers and its accountants. Some of the wealthiest, but also some of the poorest. Sunni and Shia and Christian – all religions, really.

Before the war, some of them worked for Saddam’s old Baathist regime, after the invasion some worked for the Americans, many were just caught in between. But here they are all the same. They can’t get jobs, their children have trouble getting into schools, families get separated, people get desperate.

We've seen it time and again in our stay here.

Since the Iraq war began in 2003, about two million Iraqis have fled - “escaped” the country.

Most of them to Syria and Jordan.

By 2007, with its population having grown by 8 percent, Jordan largely closed its borders.

Syria experienced a similar increase and imposed visa restrictions for the first time later that year.

Relief from the violence in Iraq costs 300 dollars if you travel by private taxi from Baghdad to Damascus.

Thirty dollars buys you a seat on one of the buses that travel between the two capitals every day.

It’s only 500 miles, but it can take 20 hours to get through the coalition checkpoints – and the Syrian border guards.

But whatever the hardship of a 20 hour bus ride, arrival in Syria means safety- safety from the suicide bombers and the kidnappers and the sectarian violence that is post-Saddam Iraq.

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