KEY POINTS:
There's a new joke doing the rounds in the Swedish town of Sodertalje. An Iraqi father and son are walking down the street and come across a blond-haired blue-eyed man. "Wow! Look!" squeals the little boy, "here's a real-life Swedish person!"
Lying just outside Stockholm, surrounded by tranquil
lakes and slopes of fragrant pine trees, it might be marked on the map as Sodertalje, but many of its newest residents quip that it could easily be dubbed Mesopotalje.
That's because last year, this unassuming, unremarkable Swedish town welcomed 1069 Iraqi refugees.
That's twice as many as the entire United States and one in 20 of the Iraqis seeking asylum in Europe.
Michael is one of the people who sold everything he owned to try to build a new life 3200km away.
Even now, almost a year after arriving, he's so scared by the violence back home and the potential consequences for friends and family still there that he prefers to use a Western alias.
"I was a Christian working for foreign companies, and as the extremists see it, I'm betraying my country twice over," he explains.
First came the threatening emails. Then it was the heavy breathing phone calls. The final straw was an envelope delivered to his home in Baghdad. There was no letter, just a bullet.
Michael sprang into action, selling off jewellery and hi-tech gadgets to buy his wife and five-year-old daughter one-way tickets out of the country.
Four months later, he'd managed to sell the house and got on a plane to join them in Sweden. He now has a flat in Sodertalje, he's mastering the local lingo thanks to free Swedish lessons provided by the council, and his daughter is enrolled at school.
It is this generous welfare system as well as the country's lack of involvement in the conflict raging back in Iraq that draws refugees to Sweden.
What attracts them to Sodertalje in particular is a Middle Eastern migration route dating back to the late 1960s when Assyrian immigrants from Lebanon, Syria and Turkey put down roots here.
And that means today's refugees find themselves feeling at home.
You can speak Arabic almost everywhere. You can stand on the terraces and cheer on Assyriska and Syrianska, two Assyrian football teams, at the local stadium. In neighbourhoods such as Ronna, it's almost like a "Little Baghdad" with Iraqi delicacies on offer in the local stores.
And when it comes to religion, all the Christian denominations common in Iraq have churches in Sodertalje, so whether you're Chaldean Catholic, Syriac Orthodox or Syriac Catholic, there's a place to worship.
At the Chaldean Catholic Church this month, families gathered for the baptism of three Iraqi babies. Celebrating the budding new lives was clearly a welcome relief from the incessant stream of death, whether a relative in the wrong place at the wrong time when a suicide bomber struck or a friend killed by insurgent hitmen.
"More and more people are coming here because the situation in Iraq is so bad," said Soran Mansour Hanna, a member of the St John's congregation whose son Gabriel was one of the three baptised.
"At Sunday mass, it's totally packed upstairs and we have to spill over downstairs. Christian people cannot stay in Iraq; if you're seen wearing a cross you could be killed."
There was a stark reminder of that just last month when the Rev Ragheed Ganni, who used to work at the Sodertalje church, was gunned down in Mosul shortly after celebrating Mass.
Although his death might be commonplace in post-Saddam Iraq, in life he was a rarity for being one of the few trying to go back to Iraq. But there is a flood coming the other way and it is pushing Sodertalje to breaking point, said Mats Pertoft, the head of the council's integrations committee.
"Right now the most frequent question from refugees is, 'When do we get a flat?' but it's difficult when housing is a real problem already in the Stockholm area.
"Of course that's a source of conflict ... Sodertalje locals don't like to see the newcomers getting flats first."
Although Sodertalje was the destination of choice for 12 per cent of Iraqi refugees who sought asylum in Sweden last year, the country as a whole casts a wide welcome mat.
It received 9000 asylum applications from Iraqis in 2006, more than any other European country.
However, a decision taken at the national level might be about to change the well-trodden path from Iraq to Sweden.
On July 6, the Swedish migration board ruled that Iraqis seeking asylum must prove they face personal risk in their homeland to avoid being sent back. It based its decision on a court ruling earlier in the year that Iraq was not an armed conflict zone.
In a decision widely seen as an abrupt change in Sweden's asylum rules, the migration board rejected the requests of an Iraqi from Baghdad and another from southern Iraq because they could not "point to any individual circumstances" to prove they were in more peril than others in their home areas.
Hikmet Hussain, who heads the Federation of Iraqi Associations in Sweden, said many people had been in touch with him, worried about whether friends and relatives will be able to come and join them, worried about being sent back.
"It's absurd to have to ... prove you are in danger in Iraq. We can't go to the insurgents and ask them for a certificate saying that they will kill us at such and such time," Hussain said.
"I think the decision was Sweden's way to dissuade people in Iraq from turning up in greater droves on the doorstep."
The Swedish government swiftly dismisses the accusations, keen to point out that the migration board is not a political entity and that the rejected asylum seekers have the right to appeal.
Migration Minister Tobias Billstrom says that the situation is bad in some parts of Iraq but insists others are more stable and so people can stay in their homeland.
But he admits Sweden is taking the strain when it comes to receiving Iraqi refugees.
"More countries need to get involved ... I have constantly argued at the EU's Council of Ministers that we need to have burden-sharing."
When his country takes over the rotating presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2009, it will lobby to establish a common asylum policy.
Back in Sodertalje, Pertoft thinks the United States should be doing more for the victims of a civil conflict sparked by its invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.
"The United States has to accept the moral and ethical consequences of their military actions, but as they are failing to, then Sweden must step in and foot the bill," he said.
For those like Ali Rasoul Jaber, a former Baghdad University professor who got his residency permit at the end of last year, Sweden is a haven, free from the daily soundtrack of bombs, mortar rounds and gunfire.
Others like Saaor Wafer, a mechanical engineer who arrived from the Iraqi capital three months ago, face an agonising wait for their papers to come through.
Memories surface of his brother being kidnapped by insurgents and of the typed letter he received telling him he deserved to be killed because his firm had contracts with American companies.
"I have a real case for coming here," he said, adding, "God bless the King and Queen of Sweden."
- INDEPENDENT
Home Swede home
* UNHCR statistics show Iraqi asylum requests in Sweden quadrupled last year.
* Sweden was the top destination among industrialised countries for Iraqis, with 9000 applications, followed by the Netherlands (2800), Germany (2100) and Greece (1400).
* Britain received about 1300, and the United States received just over 500.
* Iraq was the main country of origin for refugees in 2006, with 22,200 asylum claims lodged by Iraqi citizens, an increase of 77 per cent compared with 2005.
