BAGHDAD - As unrest shakes the Arab world, Iraq is seizing the moment to make an audacious pitch to thousands of its citizens living abroad: Come back ? we’re stable by comparison.

The government is offering free plane tickets and about $250 to smooth the return home for Iraqis in Egypt and Yemen in what a State Department official called “an impressive effort.”

The official, who asked to be quoted anonymously because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the Iraqi plan, said the only comparable effort was a smaller stipend that the government distributed to refugees in Syria and Jordan last year.

“They are our families and our brothers,” said Salman al-Khafagy, a deputy minister for migration and displacement, who described the uprising in Egypt as a potential “positive” development for Iraq. “We want to keep all those families in Baghdad.”

So far, more than 2,200 of the approximately 28,000 Iraqis living in Egypt have returned on flights sponsored by the government, Mr. Khafagy said. He said Iraq was prepared to make the same offer to the 10,000 or so Iraqis in Yemen.

It is unclear whether the gambit will succeed. Many refugees have been gone for years and have rented apartments, found jobs and built new lives. Several people who had returned said they were taking advantage of the offer simply to visit relatives for a few weeks.

“We’re settled,” said Haithan Abed al Wahed, 46, an engineering professor who moved to Egypt with his family in 2006 and returned to Baghdad 10 days ago. “I wish I could live here, but it’s so difficult.”

Mr. Wahed said he left Iraq after surviving two bombings and witnessing a shooting. He had friends in Egypt and found work there as a tutor. He has enrolled his three children in school, and he said it was cheaper to live there.

“I will of course go back,” Mr. Wahed said, referring to Egypt. He and others said that they were relieved to leave Egypt, but that they planned to stay in Baghdad only until Egypt quieted.

The overture by the Iraqi government is rare among countries that have lost significant portions of their populations, said Monica Duffy Toft, an associate professor at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “It’s a sign,” she said, “of the maturing Iraq government and a signal that it’s ready to repatriate Iraqi citizens.”

She said refugees typically decided to come home only after hearing from friends or family that it was, and then did so without much help from the government.

Mr. Khafagy said Iraq hoped to encourage doctors, engineers, professors and other members of the middle and upper classes to return.

“These countries offered them a place to be when it was too violent here,” he said. “We don’t forget what these countries did and offered our people, and we are thankful. But we have to look to bring them back.”

But some of the returning Iraqis said their homecoming after so many years was a sad and uneasy one, haunted by fears of suicide bombings and kidnappings and filled with reminders of the instability, dysfunction and economic woes that drove them abroad.

They said they still looked over their shoulders when they stepped outside, and were disheartened by the perpetually snarled traffic, the intermittent electric service, the piles of trash and the canyons of blast walls in Baghdad. Their disappointment, and their eagerness to leave Baghdad as soon as possible, highlight Iraq’s struggle to keep the estimated 100,000 refugees who have already returned from fleeing.

In a United Nations survey, more than 60 percent of the people who returned to Baghdad said they regretted their decision. They said they felt unsafe and could not find work. Many expressed a desire to leave.

“We were satisfied in Cairo,” Liwa Waji Hussein said this month as scenes from Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the Cairo demonstrations, played on a television in his parents’ Baghdad home. “The kids were in school; everything was normal. But here, I’m afraid.”

But Becca Heller, director of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York, said that a return to Iraq - however temporary -could imperil any asylum requests.

“Technically, under the law, when you return to your country of origin voluntarily you are surrendering your refugee status,” she said, although she noted that humanitarian exceptions could be granted.

Zaman Saad Fadhil, 26, who returned on February 11 after nearly five years away, said she was trying to choose between two bad options. In Baghdad, she said, there were few chances for work, and she feared explosions.

But she worried that Egypt could sink into chaos.

“I didn’t want to come back,” she said. “It’s all destroyed. It’s a disaster. But I might stay here.”


By JACK HEALY and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT