Why aren’t the Iraqis building new grocery stores and cleaning? Aren’t there plenty of them to do the jobs? If 6,000 forced labor workers have been evacuated since 2003, I’m guessing it’s not just a small percentage of the 30-50,000 foreign workers who are forced into labor. Again the poor are taken advantage of.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - In Sri Lanka’s war-torn north and east, where killings happen every day and work is nearly nonexistent, it doesn’t take much to entice a man to leave.

So when an employment agency offered a steady paycheck for laboring amid Dubai’s soaring glass and steel towers, 17 young Sri Lankan men paid their fee to the job brokers - $2,000, a small fortune on this tropical island - and signed up.

But instead of going to work, they were locked in a room guarded by a man with a pistol. They had been sold to another agency, they were told, for $1,200 apiece.

It took them two weeks to realize where they were: Iraq.

“We knew Iraq was dangerous, and Sri Lanka was dangerous, but at least we thought our parents will get to see our corpses if we die here,” said Krishnan Piraitheepan 32, shortly after returning to Sri Lanka this month with the help of the International Organization for Migration, a Geneva-based intergovernmental organization.

Thousands of Sri Lankans, and tens of thousands of other people from such poverty-battered countries as the Philippines, India and Nepal, go to the oil-rich Middle East every year to work. Their pay, usually $200-$400 a month, can be many times what they would earn at home, even after the agency fees that can leave families deeply indebted.

So they become maids in Kuwait, and drivers in Saudi Arabia. They work as nannies in Dubai and Bahrain.

Some, like the 17 Sri Lankans, end up in Iraq.

While there are no reliable statistics on forced labor in Iraq, government officials and aid groups warn the Sri Lankans’ case highlights the potential for abuse. The situation is further distorted because a number of countries that are major labor suppliers to the Middle East, including Sri Lanka, ban their citizens from traveling to Iraq.

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