BAGHDAD: The 80,000 or so Palestinians in Iraq feel they have lost out twice since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Many have lost both their jobs and their homes in the aftermath of the war.
They also say they are less welcome among Iraqis now than under the old regime, which cultivated the myth that the Palestinians were generously looked after by Saddam.
"My Iraqi friend asked me the other day what we were still doing here now that Saddam is gone," said Mustafa Mohammed, who lives with his family in an old barracks in Saafraniyah near Baghdad.
In fact, most Palestinians lived in poor conditions even under Saddam and, until 2001, they were allowed to own neither cars nor shops.
For the last 10 months, Mustafa daughter has been living together with the family of her husband on the muddy football pitch of a Palestinian sports club in Baghdad's Baladiyat district.
Her mother-in-law, Camilia Saleh Mohammed, had been chased out of her flat by her landlord immediately after the US troops moved into the capital in April last year. Prior to that the Iraqi state had rented the apartment cheaply for the Palestinians.
The nine-strong family now lives in two small tents. When it rains, their mattresses are soaked through. In the summer, temperatures went up to 60 degrees Celsius inside the tents.
In total 500 Palestinians are still housed on the field in tents supplied by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Another 1,000 people have been moved into housing elsewhere, and the remaining Palestinians are hoping to be supplied with accommodation in the next two months. Their flats are due to be paid for a year from UNHCR funds and donations of Muslim aid agencies.
Camilia Mohammed has been able to have a look at the accommodation designated for her.
"We are to move into a building which used to house a secret service office, but the looters have destroyed all windows and stole the doors, and there is neither water nor gas for cooking," says the emaciated woman.
But, she adds: "The woman from the ministry told me, either you live here or you stay in the tent."
In the neighbouring tent Fatma Abdallah is just preparing a stew with chick peas and some meat that a British aid agency distributed in the camp the day before.
"Our landlord told us he would douse us with petrol and set us ablaze if we don't move out. That's how I ended up here with my five children and my husband who has a heart disease," she says tearfully.
Most of the Palestinians in Iraq have been in the country for more than 50 years, ever since Iraq's royal family granted them asylum in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
Saddam Hussein later emphasized the solidarity with the Palestinian people as part of his propaganda attempt to style himself as the future liberator of Jerusalem.
Nonetheless, the living conditions of the Palestinians in Iraq have mostly been nothing but miserable.
"Out of a total of 10,000 Palestinian families in Iraq, a mere 68 are today living in their own four walls," says Qusay Rifaat al- Mahdi.
He is a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and heads the Haifa sports club where the displaced families have pitched their tents.
"We used to like Saddam's political speeches against imperialism and Zionism but they were always in stark contrast to reality," he says pensively - and adds after a pause: "But that is really the case with all Arabic heads of state."-dpa