He rented an apartment for his wife and children, and then traveled to Lebanon. There, he applied for refugee status, encouraged by an announcement by American officials that immigration quotas for Iraqis would be raised, but ran out of money after waiting months for his application to be processed. Unable to work in Lebanon legally, and faced with a choice of bringing his wife and children into poverty there, or living apart in Iraq, he decided to return to Iraq, forfeiting his application.

Now he lives on the third floor of a cheap motel in a poor neighborhood in Baghdad, away from his wife and children. He sleeps on a thin foam mattress and padlocks his door at night.

“My economic situation controls me,” he said. “I have nothing now.”

The squat, dingy, five-story motel is filled with Iraqis leading double or even triple lives. There are many varieties: Police officers who encountered trouble in their neighborhoods, interpreters for the American military, and laborers like Hamed. They pay $80 a month for a room.

Almost everyone there is someone else. Hamed shares his small room with his brother, who tells residents that he works in an electrical shop. Another resident, Felah, a 42-year-old former sports coach who works at the same American base as Hamed, says that he is a carpenter. He says he works for a company that makes desks for schools, a story he chose because he had some carpentry experience and could bluff if confronted.

Each detail of his life must match. He portrays a scar on his hand, from when he tried to free an American soldier whose leg was trapped under a forklift, as a wound from a wood sander.

His cover was threatened when an elderly resident asked him to repair a bed. Felah liked the man and handled the task well, but that only invited another request: Could he make a table? Busy with his job at the base managing an Iraqi work team, and not skilled enough in carpentry, Felah decided against taking the job, but could not tell the man. “I’m thinking to go buy this from a store, and tell him, ‘I made this for you,’” he said.

“Our life, it makes you laugh, but it’s a tragedy,” said Felah, a bowlegged Shiite man with a tired look, who has lost six close relatives, including a brother, to Sunni militants, and whose wife and children have been forbidden to see him by a bitterly sectarian father-in-law. “We feel that we are not telling the truth, but what can we do?”