Sweden.

By Vivienne Walt

The view from Alaa's apartment reveals streets and sidewalks carpeted in fresh snow, a tableau of tranquillity half a world away from the chaos of Iraq. But inside, the war is never far from his mind. The television set is turned at high volume to a talk show on Baghdadi TV, an Iraqi satellite channel. Only Arabic books line the bookshelves in the living room; Alaa and his roommate, Ali Hamad, an ophthalmologist from Baghdad, barely speak English, let alone the language of the country in which they have sought refuge. As he welcomes a visitor with the typical Iraqi drink of sugared mint tea, Alaa laughs. "This is Little Iraq," he says.

Alaa, 29, left Baghdad in January, a few days after Saddam Hussein was hanged. A group of gunmen had smashed in his front door and ransacked the house. Alaa, a Shi'ite television producer who was at work at the time, believes that Sunni militants wanted to kill him for covering Saddam's trial. And so, as hundreds of Iraqis do each day, Alaa decided to pack up his things and flee. At the time he wasn't sure where he was going or who would take him in. Now he finds himself sharing a two-room apartment with people who were complete strangers just weeks ago, in a country he knows little about--but that is, for the foreseeable future, his new home: Sweden.

This country of 9 million has long prided itself on being one of the world's most hospitable to foreigners fleeing war and hardship. After the 1991 Gulf War, Sweden took in thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites and Kurds. But nothing could have prepared Swedes for the numbers of Iraqis who are pouring in today. While most of the 2 million Iraqis who have left since the U.S. invasion in 2003 have remained in the Middle East, a growing number are trying to make their way out of the region, in search of refuge and the promise of a new life in the West. Having granted asylum to 2,330 Iraqis in 2005, Sweden received nearly four times that many last year. In December, 1,566 Iraqis arrived, nearly five times the figure in February 2006. And with Iraq's civil war still raging, Swedish officials say they are bracing for a possible 35,000 this year.

For both the new Iraqi arrivals and their Scandinavian hosts, coexistence has not come easily. Swedish officials fret about the potential security risks and the costs posed by a swelling population of displaced Muslims. Although relieved to have escaped the grinding violence of Iraq, Sweden's Iraqis face the prospect of having to rebuild shattered lives and find work in an alien society. For many, the trauma of Iraq is inescapable. Recent arrivals like Alaa say they fear being hunted down by sectarian rivals in Stockholm. "We don't know who is who here," says Alaa. In a Swedish government asylum office, he was shocked to see Iraqis in "long beards and short pants" who looked like extremist Sunnis. "I'm scared that among those people who Sweden helps are crazy Salafis who might kill me," he says.

Yet the fact that Alaa made it to Stockholm at all qualifies him as one of the lucky ones. Among Western countries, Sweden is unique in allowing entry to all Iraqis who can prove they have fled central and southern Iraq, no matter what their political involvement or how they reached Scandinavia, according to officials at the Swedish Migration Board.

Being accepted into Sweden is relatively simple compared with what it takes to actually get there. Iraqis say the odyssey north typically costs $10,000 per person and involves relying on a network of nameless smugglers and middlemen. Most Iraqis flee first to Jordan; from there smugglers arrange flights to Istanbul, where it is easy to find illegal European Union passports--red passports, as the Iraqis call them, which contain the refugees' real photos but use other people's names. "Daniel," 23, a Christian Iraqi student sitting in a Stockholm cafe, said he bought a fake Iraqi passport for $300 in Baghdad and used it to take a smuggler's ride through Syria to Turkey. In Turkey a smuggler traded Daniel's Iraqi passport for a false European passport for $8,000--paid by his parents in Baghdad. Then he hid in the back of a cargo truck with three other Iraqi men for the duration of the 3,000-mile journey into Sweden.

For many Iraqis, the initial relief of fleeing the war is replaced by the shock of being shipped to one of Sweden's overcrowded refugee camps, an hour's drive from Stockholm. Only Iraqis who can prove they will live with relatives in Sweden are permitted to stay outside government housing when they arrive; others slowly try to find accommodations once their refugee status is officially approved, usually within a few weeks of arrival. Most end up in Sweden's heavily immigrant ghettos, like the Stockholm neighborhood of Rinkeby. The area's expanse of characterless high-rise apartment buildings dates back to the 1960s, when the Swedish government poured billions into public housing. Driving into the area from Stockholm's gracious old city is like entering another country. In fact, there are few reasons that Swedes would ever visit. Little Swedish is heard in the Middle Eastern and African supermarkets, barbershops and call-service outlets; these days the street-side talk is increasingly in Arabic.

Government officials say they try to steer Iraqis to smaller towns, where housing is cheaper and their skills are in greater demand. But Iraqis resist. "It's a major problem for us," says Mattias Sjoeberg, a migration officer at the Swedish Migration Board in Stockholm. "We send people to the north or down south, but in the end many Iraqis end up in Stockholm, where there is a [Muslim] community."

Even in Stockholm, Iraqis often find their careers stalled while they spend months in Swedish-language classes. The government has made attendance in language classes a precondition for receiving asylum benefits. Then comes the slog of requalifying in their profession. While Iraqis in Stockholm praise the Swedes' welcome, they struggle to persuade locals to hire them for professional jobs. "We have a lot of highly educated people driving taxis," says Faried al-Suheil, who fled Baghdad for Stockholm in 1993, moved back in 2003, then returned to Stockholm last summer. He stood at the doorway of the Iraqi prayer hall in the Stockholm suburb of Jakobsberg late one evening. Six taxis were parked along the snowbound sidewalk while the drivers celebrated the Shi'ite holiday of Ashura inside. "The Swedes don't want to hire us" for skilled work, al-Suheil says.

But as is true around the world these days, the Iraqis in Sweden reserve their most bitter words for one another. As Iraq's ethnic fighting has intensified, so have the tensions among refugees living thousands of miles from the war. "Before, in Sweden, we never talked about who was who," says Salam Karam, an ethnic Kurdish journalist from Baghdad who moved to Stockholm with his family in 1990. "Now people talk about who's a Shi'ite, who's a former Baathist. Have they come here to hunt us?" He says he was shocked to find that when he taught Swedish to Iraqi refugees last year, "my Shi'ite students never spoke to those who were Sunnis."

The Swedish government has opted to grant refuge even to Iraqis who enter illegally rather than pursue them for using forged documents. "We don't turn anyone back," says Gunn Sundberg-Hjelm, an asylum officer at the Swedish Migration Board. "Look at the circumstances they have left." But how long can the warm welcome last? Swedish voters last September ousted the leftist government, largely over fears about growing unemployment and the country's costly welfare system. That nervousness may increasingly be directed at the new Iraqi refugees, who benefit hugely from Sweden's social services. The country has spent tens of millions of dollars on the new arrivals, who receive a daily allowance, housing and free health care. Beyond the burden to Sweden's economy, the influx could also pose a security risk, says Magnus Norell, senior analyst for the government-funded Swedish Defense Research Agency and a former Swedish Secret Service special analyst on terrorism. "It's not just that Iraqis are swamping the system," says Norell. "The government realizes that there are several people in this country who should not be here, people who would not get in because they have involvement with Islamist organizations in Iraq and Europe." With the numbers of Iraqi refugees soaring, the government doesn't "have time to do the proper investigation."

But for both the thousands of Iraqis who have found their way to Stockholm and the European hosts who have taken them in, there is no going back. Hunched over a borrowed computer in his small apartment, Alaa, the television producer, spends hours a day looking at digital photographs of his small son playing on his bed back in Iraq. Alaa hopes to get his Swedish residence papers sometime this year, allowing his wife and year-old boy to join him in Stockholm--two more Iraqis seeking escape from a world gone wrong.