Is this why there are so many Iraqi refugees abroad?

Jane Arraf, CNN's senior Baghdad correspondent and fomer bureau chief, reports for Iraqslogger from the Iranian-Iraqi border crossing at Zurbathia:

The line stretches into the hundreds as the wind whips up the sand at this border post.

Women in black abayas – the long cloaks - surrounded by fidgety children and bulging, dust-covered suitcases, young men in blue jeans, religious clerics in flowing robes and black or white turbans – all of them waiting to cross over from Iran to Iraq.

Iraqi border guards, checking documents and searching luggage by hand, can process 1,200 people a day from Iran – but there are usually many more. Most of them are Shiite families making the pilgrimage to Iraq’s holy shrines. . .

[The] pilgrims [coming in] from Iran and as far away as Pakistan as well as Iraqis trying to return home wait in the sand and dust to see whether they will part of the group border officials are able to process that day. There are plans to build a waiting hall – and a gate which the Iraqi side can control.

“We’ve been sitting here since seven a.m.,” an elderly woman named Najla tells me. She and her family have been visiting relatives in Iran and are trying to return to their homes in Diwaniya in the south.

“Essentially at the end of the day someone’s got to tell these people they can’t go across and it always creates problems,” says Col Mark Mueller, in charge of the transition team at this crossing. “They’ve waited all this time usually from 8 o clock in the morning until 5 at night and then they have to go back.”

This certainly presents a different picture of the Iraqi refugee problem than a recent New Times story painted that I blogged about here.