IRONY IN MOTION: Iraqi girls dance nightly in bright, clinging gowns, circling the stage like glittering chattel, swaying their hips seductively one moment, fearfully clutching the hand of a peer the next.

They were liberated, we are told, in the American invasion more than five years

ago. But tonight they will service Saudi businessmen and other wealthy Arabs from U.S.-friendly Gulf states who travel to Damascus to buy the pretty flesh of Iraqi refugees. The pimps in the clubs take a 90 percent cut, while the girls--some said to be as young as 11--take their places in the perverted cakewalk.

The absurd and cruel point is lost on most Americans because the predominant debate this summer has been whether the surge won the war and at what point U.S. soldiers can come home. No one asks when these lost girls--many of whom are spending their summer as "brides" of rich Arab dandies who will use them up and divorce them in the fall--can return to Iraq. The answer doesn't jibe with the current success narrative.

More likely than not, they don't have homes to return to. For many Iraqi women, their options have been systematically eliminated since U.S. bombs began to fall on Iraq in March 2003. They have lost their husbands and security, their houses through violence and sectarian cleansing, their dignity and freedom to fundamentalist militias that marched into the breach when neighborhoods began breaking down. Thousands fled over the borders. Countless others were kidnapped or coerced into leaving--including youngsters spirited away from Baghdad orphanages--and pressed into cross-border sexploitation.

The humiliating bargain they struck to survive limits their ability to return to Iraq safely. Even if these women and girls were to locate their families, it is likely that they would be disowned, even hunted like animals and killed for soiling their clans' reputations. So-called "honor killings" have been on the rise in Iraq since the war began. Or the women might end up with countless others in Iraqi prisons, or squatting in burned-out buildings, or back in brothels. "I have no one there and in any case I am afraid for my life," 16-year-old Nada told BBC News in 2007. "My family has abandoned me." She was forced into prostitution in Syria after her father dumped her at the border, and was facing deportation when the story aired.

Girls like Nada are but a fraction of the estimated 2.3 million Iraqi refugees who, if they decided to return en masse, would join some 2.7 million internally displaced Iraqis who have endured similar horrors in their own neighborhoods. Private contractors working on the U.S. taxpayers' dime have been accused of human trafficking and running forced labor in the Green Zone, the epicenter of the foreign occupation.

Furthermore, a food crisis, drought, and an ongoing lack of the necessities--clean water, electricity, healthcare, and jobs--have made Iraq a fragile place, even if the bullets aren't flying as frequently as a year ago.

"At this time, [we] cannot promote or encourage return to Iraq until [refugees] can do so in dignity and safety," and that's just not going to happen anytime soon, says Ziad Ayad, a research officer at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Jordan, which is the primary provider of assistance to 54,000 registered Iraqi refugees there. A total of 500,000 to 750,000 Iraqis have sought refuge in Jordan--17,000 were granted visas in the last three months alone. There are approximately 1.2 million Iraqis in Syria, about 215,000 of them registered with UNHCR.

"I think the crisis itself undermines the success story that the [Bush] administration wants people to focus on," says Abbas Kadhim, assistant professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in California and a refugee of the first Gulf War. A Shi'ite from Najaf, he came to the U.S. in 1992, fleeing the wrath of Saddam Hussein. "All this good news coming out of Iraq right now," he says, referring to the security gains associated with the surge, "will pale when they see that millions of Iraqis cannot go back to their country."

U.S. and Iraqi officials hailed the return of some 46,000 Iraqis from Syria in the fall of 2007. But aid organizations called it a publicity stunt. Returns have since "slowed dramatically," according to Refugees International.

Many Iraqis keep in close touch with people back home and know the situation on the ground. "I talked to one woman," said Kathleen Newland, cofounder of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, "who went back [from Jordan] to check on her house. She got as far as her neighbor's house and they said, 'Look, don't go there. People are living there, and they're not friendly. They'll kill you.'"

So these mostly middle-class Sunni Iraqis exhaust their remaining resources and live at the mercy of limited charity and the benevolence of foreign hosts. By law they aren't allowed to work. Under-the-table jobs, where they are available, invite more exploitation and abuse. Locals, particularly Jordanians, who after 60 years host some 1.7 million Palestinians and ten sprawling refugee camps, are getting wary. Both Jordan and Syria have imposed restrictions on new entries.

"The situation is only getting increasingly desperate as the cost of living is dramatically increasing," says Ayad, noting that fuel prices have spiked over 100 percent in Jordan. "Cash assistance isn't keeping up with inflation."

Freelance writer Danielle Pergament recently interviewed three Iraqi women who had resorted to prostitution in Jordan. She said, "a short time ago, they were nurses, salesclerks, students leading normal lives," but they had no way of surviving once they reached Amman. "I have no home anymore, no family, no piece of land," said "Malek," a 34-year-old from Karbala who eluded death--her mother wasn't so lucky--when their home was bombed. She was shot twice while working for the U.S. military in the Green Zone. When she fled to Jordan penniless and couldn't find a job, she turned to prostitution.

"The crowning irony among many of the women I met: Their best clients in Amman are American and European military personnel and contractors," Pergament wrote in a Marie Claire report entitled "Survival Sex." In the article, Malek recalls her first time with a john--an American--who mistook her bullet-deformed leg from her days in the Green Zone for a disease. After she explained that she had taken the bullets working for his government, "He told me to go."

Relief workers say authorities in Jordan and Syria have largely ignored the plight of these Iraqi women and girls, despite the reports circulating since 2004. Only now are aid workers able to operate more freely, establishing a few safe houses for the most vulnerable. The difficulty, advocates say, is that unlike in the typical refugee camp, this population has largely melted into the urban landscape. The majority hide in fear and embrace anonymity, which helps explain why so few have registered for assistance.

Carole Laleve, who works for UNHCR in Damascus, says they have recruited female refugees to help draw out the most desperate cases. "To be honest, until a few months ago, they wouldn't even talk about the issue of prostitution," she reports. "Now they're talking about it more openly."

A conspiracy of silence in these conservative Muslim host countries, combined with a lack of international scrutiny, makes this a difficult story to tell. Statistics are elusive. Iraqi women's rights activist Hana Ibrihim reported that more than 50,000 Iraqi girls worked in the Syrian sex industry in 2007, but her numbers were never independently confirmed.

In a hint of acknowledgement, the U.S. State Department admonished the governments of Syria and Iraq in its 2008 "Trafficking in Persons Report" for allowing Iraqis to be victimized by sexual exploitation and forced labor. There was no mention, however, of Iraqi prostitutes or labor abuses against Iraqi refugees in America's close ally Jordan.

Even these official admissions were muted. Speaking at eager press briefings, neither Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice nor her deputies mentioned the Iraqi refugees or the countries involved in their abuse, thus ignoring this tragic consequence of their war policy and shielding the legacy of the president.

In the absence of official data, advocates and journalists have attempted to map this overlooked hell by documenting personal stories--"one more horrific than the next," according to Newland. One need look no further than YouTube to see scattered footage of club dancing and streetwalkers.

After posing as a customer in more than one Damascus club in 2005, freelance writer Joshua E.S. Phillips described a grim hub of girls, some orphans, others breadwinners. "One wonders why child prostitution in Syria hasn't garnered more attention," Phillips wrote. Considering the number of people who refused to talk for this story, shame and mistrust would seem to have a lot to do with it.

In the summer of 2007, Western news cameras did go into the clubs in Damascus and zoomed in on tiny spandexed girls--who in this country would be begging their mothers for Hannah Montana tickets--awkwardly thrusting nonexistent bosoms for the clientele. "Some have been sexually abused in Iraq, but others are being prostituted by fathers and uncles who bring them here under the pretext of protecting them," activist Bassam al-Kadi told The Independent in June 2007. "They are virgins, and they are brought here like an investment and exploited in a very ugly way."

The images came and went that summer like a garish sideshow. They seemed to have no lasting impact. As of March of this year, Syria wasn't even doing the minimum to prosecute traffickers and pimps, according to the State Department.

Meanwhile, in Jordan, single females heading households are considered priority submissions for resettlement--but they aren't going anywhere. Not for a lack of trying. UNHCR has managed to place only 5,600 Jordan-based Iraqis in other countries since the beginning of 2007; only 1,472 Iraqis in Syria have resettled in that time. The U.S. has welcomed a mere 8,000 refugees since 2003. Women who are desperate to get out make plum targets for smuggling and trafficking schemes.

An Iraqi interviewed by the Associated Press in July said she doused herself and her 14-year-old daughter in gasoline in an attempt to end it all after she gave a smuggler her life savings--$18,000--to take them over the border from Turkey to Greece. The smuggler vanished. She said she would have killed herself rather than sell her body, which seemed her only option. But her daughter's tearful pleas prevented her from lighting the match. "She was in my arms, soaked with gasoline, and shivering from fright," she said. "I was so very desperate, and there was no way out."

"The situation is getting out of hand," says Laleve. "We see a lot of women who haven't necessarily become prostitutes, but they were kidnapped, raped repeatedly, and they are in Syria all alone. That's quite clear. We did a survey of trauma and we found incredible rates of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Among children, among women, and the population in general."

YanarMohammed, founder of Women's Freedom in Iraq, told Pacifica News that "in Syria, we hear that some women reach the point where they are begging strangers passing by to exploit them sexually so they can feed their children.

"You know, women of Iraq were not in this situation, I would say, six years ago. We did not have to do this. We did not have to go through humiliation, through prostitution. We did not have to beg in the embassies to be accepted in the Western world, when the attack on our lives came from the West."

The State Department reports that the U.S. has devoted $208 million to refugee assistance this year--a meager sum when one considers the estimated $430 million a day the U.S. spends on military operations in Iraq.

"This sends a very wrong message, not only to the region, but to Iraqi civilians," says Kristele Younes, an advocate for Refugees International and a frequent visitor to Jordan and Syria. "Of course the problem is finding any political will on the part of the administration to even acknowledge the extent of the situation. They think people would see that as an acknowledgement of failure."

Newland, who traveled to the region as recently as February, calls the U.S. contribution "deleterious and stingy," but says that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hasn't cloaked himself in glory either. "The Iraqi government has been absolutely disgraceful in helping the Iraqi refugees--they've given practically no money, and they have lots of money. That's one thing they do have. There seems to be a very large gap between what they say and what they do."

Maliki, flush with more than $70 billion in oil revenues this year, went to Europe recently to lobby for more aid. He told leaders that Iraq would soon be able to welcome back millions of refugees. But relief advocates fear that countries like the U.S. will take this as a license to restrict resettlements further.

And while a visible wave of Iraqis coming home would ensure a PR coup for Maliki and the Bush administration, reality would be less kind to the returning refugees. "If you push people to return," charges Younes, "it will further destabilize the country." Newland calls it "morally wrong." Sectarian cleansing has reordered the Iraqi map, reducing the daily violence, but every humanitarian metric shows there is only a shell of a country to return to, and women are still extremely vulnerable.

According to Maha Sidky of UNHCR in Baghdad, women "enjoy less freedom of movement," and safe houses are few. The State Department's trafficking report indicates that Maliki has let another year pass without taking "any meaningful action to address trafficking in persons over the reporting period."

As for direct American complicity, there have been fleeting anecdotes about the availability of prostitutes for U.S. military personnel and other Westerners inside the country, but this isn't Saigon 40 years ago. A domestic sex trade exists--CNN reports that widows in Baghdad sell their bodies for as little as $8--though culture, religion, and discipline have conspired to drive it underground.

Investigative journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote of hearing about Iraqi prostitutes scrawling Arabic anti-occupation slogans in lipstick across the bathroom mirrors in the Green Zone. There were also reports of Iraqi prostitutes among the Army guards involved in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in 2004. And in April, whistleblower Bruce Halley testified before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee that his former site manager, a subcontractor for DynCorp--whose employees had been accused in the 1990s of running an underage prostitution ring in the Balkans--had been engaged in delivering prostitutes from Kuwait to hotels operated by DynCorp in Baghdad. The story went nowhere.