PHOTOS: Iraqis in El Cajon

Joseph Ziauddin, right, president of the East County Refugee Center, helps Iraqi refugee Rami Azeez complete a job application in the patio furniture department of an El Cajon store. Azeez, in his early 20s, says he’s filled out hundreds of applications in the last year, all with the same answers: Position? -- “Anything.” Available start date? -- “Any time.” Full or part-time? -- “All the time.”  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

In their El Cajon apartment, Iraqi refugee Abdul Azeez, with his wife, Haifaa, shows how he was tortured with a glowing hot metal poker by gunmen who broke into his house in Baghdad. Before that their daughter had been kidnapped and $25,000 ransom demanded. The Azeezes are among thousands of Iraqi families that fled their war-torn homeland, only to find joblessness, welfare lines and isolation amid fellow refugees in this city east of San Diego.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Iraqi refugees shop at the Babylon International Market on Main Street in El Cajon. Set in the heart of the Iraqi community, the market is full of imported products and the foods of their homeland.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Iraqi refuges, from left, Haytham Bolas, Maha Ibrahem and her sister Nadm walk through a residential neighborhood in El Cajon. The sisters fled with their parents because of religious persecution after their brother was kidnapped and never seen again. Maha said of her family’s language and employment frustrations in America, “Life is worse here but we have nothing to go back for.”  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Jwan Sulaiman was an anesthiologist in Baghdad. Now she works as a telephone translator from the bedroom of her little apartment in El Cajon. She fled Iraq after militants killed her cousin and she narrowly avoided a car bomb. “In San Diego, I have no fear,” she said in fluent English. “If I can’t go to heaven later on, I’m living it now.”  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Iraqi refugees line up at a welfare office in El Cajon, believed to have the second-largest Iraqi population in the country.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

La Pita Kabob tea cafe on Main Street in El Cajon is jammed with retired and unemployed Iraqi men playing backgammon, cards and dominoes. As the violence grinds on in Iraq and the recession grinds on in California, newcomers continue to arrive in this enclave east of San Diego that is hard-pressed to train and employ so many.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

At St. Peter Chaldean Cathedral in El Cajon, a church member carries a new mattress for a recently arrived Iraqi refugee family. This city east of San Diego has a well-established Iraqi Chaldean community, but the huge number of new refugees is straining the ability of the city to absorb them all.  (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)