VICTORIA, British Columbia, Oct. 29 (UPI) -- Ten percent of Iraq’s population has been turned into refugees, almost half in their own country, a direct result of the U.S.-led invasion and subsequent occupation of the country in March 2003, creating the second-largest refugee problem in the Middle East.

Only the Palestinian refugee crisis, with close to 5 million displaced Palestinians scattered around the Middle East and beyond, tops the Iraqi refugee crisis.

But these numbers might change very suddenly, catapulting the Iraqi refugee crisis to the top of the list.

Threats of potential incursions into northern Iraq by the Turkish military in hot pursuit of members of the PKK, the Kurdish Workers Party, may yet create a new wave of Iraqi refugees.

This time the bulk of the refugees fleeing will be from Kurdish-controlled areas, which until now have enjoyed relative calm and prosperity.

The Kurdish problem complicates an already thorny issue, placing additional stress on Turkish-U.S. relations. Washington can ill-afford to lose the support of either the Kurds in northern Iraq or that of the Turkish government across the border. Both play a vital role in supporting the U.S. war effort in Iraq, and Turkey allows the U.S. Air Force the use of its air bases as forward-operating bases in the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Losing access to those bases would set the U.S. military back considerably; it would instead have to rely on bases as far away as Germany.

By that same token, Turkey, too, is a strong ally of the United States in the fight against terrorism. But Ankara remains adamant in its fight against Kurdish separatists and the outlawed PKK.

In trying to appease both Turkey and the Kurds, Washington seems to find itself caught between, excuse the pun, Iraq and a hard place. If Washington stands with the Kurds, it risks upsetting Ankara, with whom relations are already thinly stretched by recent attempts by the U.S. Congress to pass a non-binding resolution declaring the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks 90 years ago a genocide.

Regardless of what happens next, the problem of Iraq’s refugees is not about to go away anytime soon. After the end of major combat operations, violence in Iraq continued to claim lives as the war took a different turn, plunging into an undeclared civil war with unprecedented sectarian killings and counter-killings, pushing hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee.

The arrival of a million refugees in Syria and another million in Jordan is placing unprecedented strain on the host countries, taxing their housing markets and their public health and education systems to the breaking point, forcing officials to reassess their open-doors policy.

If until now Iraq’s neighbors have shown compassion toward their fellow Arabs by opening their borders along with their arms, that policy is starting to change. While no official figure exists, the United Nations estimates the number of Iraqis who have escaped their country as a result of armed violence at around 2.6 million since the start of the war.

Some 2 million Iraqis have fled to Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and other countries in the region. Yemen, Iran and Turkey have also seen increased flows of Iraqi refugees. Another 1.8 million have become “internal displaced personnel” -- refugees in their own country. Those are people who have run away from their homes to seek safer refuge in other parts of the country and within their own communities after suffering sectarian violence, receiving death threats or having one or more members of their families killed.

But as the numbers continue to grow, Iraqi refugees are beginning to feel they are reaching the point where they have overstayed their welcome.

Syria and Jordan, the two main reception centers for Iraqi refugees until now, are starting to request that future refugees obtain visas first. And when visas are issued for three or six months, Iraqis are forced to travel back to Iraq in order to renew them -- an expensive, not to mention dangerous, undertaking in a war zone.

For the Lebanese who face an already serious crisis with Palestinian refugees, the previously opened door to Iraqi refugees is rapidly closing. In Lebanon, which hosts about 50,000 Iraqis, refugees are increasingly arrested if found to be in the country illegally. Some find themselves imprisoned and forced to choose between imprisonment or deportation.

The cry from many Iraqis is that while the Arab neighbors are closing the doors on immigration, the United States, which bears a certain degree of moral responsibility, has kept its doors to Iraqi immigration pretty tightly shut.

Since the start of the war, the United States has only admitted 700 Iraqis. More recently, the United States announced it would consider for resettlement up to 7,000 Iraqi refugees referred to it by UNHCR.

The peace conference President Bush hopes to hold in Annapolis, Md., next month should address, in part, the question of Palestinian refugees. But as Iraqis continue to trickle out of their homeland by the thousands, who is looking out for their interests before the question of Iraqi refugees turns into another refugee crisis on a scale equal to that of the Palestinians?

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(Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times.)

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(e-mail: Claude@metimes.com)