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Take a look at Za Aytiryya, the neighbourhood where Iraqi Christian refugees live in Beirut. Or take a tour the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus for a glimpse of a Muslim world. Or meet the child refugees whose lives are also on hold, waiting for resettlement.

These three slide shows give another view of the shrinking world of Iraqi refugees.

The 10,000-plus Iraqis in Lebanon have no legal status. Lebanon never signed the United Nations Convention on Refugees. The country has no legal or administrative mechanism to deal with a person seeking asylum of any kind. While it does recognize Palestinian refugees, they are an exception.

The police are not actively trying to round up refugees and put them in jail or send them out of the country. As long as they don’t wander out of the Christian neighbourhoods of Beirut or otherwise draw attention, authorities are willing to pretend they’re not there.

The biggest and best story of Deborah Amos’s 28-year career as a Middle East correspondent comes in the form of an eminently readable, fast-paced book about the Iraqi refugee crisis — Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile and Upheaval in the Middle East.

Amos spent five years among Iraq’s two million exiles, sipping tea with them in tiny, crumbling, empty apartments in the poor Geramana neighbourhood of Damascus, retracing their journeys from Baghdad by taxi, tracking them down after they resettled in the United States. Out of the whirlwind of “shock and awe” attacks on Baghdad in 2003, and the confusing rhetoric about weapons of mass destruction and regime change and democratizing the Middle East, Amos discovered that the key to understanding what was happening in Iraq was in the people streaming out of Iraq.

TORONTO - Helping refugees is a prime example of what it means to “go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” says Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins, and through the archdiocese’s Office for Refugees (ORAT) Catholics have been able to follow Christ’s example in caring for others.

“It is a tremendous blessing to have the Office for Refugees working in our archdiocese,” Archbishop Thomas Collins said in a written statement. “We have seen countless examples of our parishes embracing strangers from foreign lands and journeying with them as they begin life in a new country and community.”