She was just 14 when her mother yanked her out of school and rushed her home, where Saddam Hussein's security men were forcing the family into government jeeps at gunpoint, having already dumped their possessions onto the street and sealed the house.

Within 24 hours, Mrs. Kavarizadeh was packed onto an overcrowded truck and dumped with tens of thousands of other Iraqis on the Iranian border with just the clothes on their backs.

"They told us our great-grandfather had been Iranian, but even he was buried in Iraq," said Mrs. Kavarizadeh, now 37, sitting on the carpeted floor of a two-room unfurnished house in southeast Iran, where she has lived for about 23 unsettled years. "We had no idea that we were of Iranian origin; we had never even been to Iran, and no one had ever said that to us before. We were victims of the fight between the Sunnis and the Shiites."

After Mr. Hussein's fall two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees scattered throughout Iran have become impatient to resume their lives in Iraq.

Iran, too, would like to see them gone, but the American and British occupation forces are not particularly eager recipients. For one thing, accepting tens of thousands of families seeking to reclaim confiscated property would only augment the tumult that administrators have barely been able to contain. 

Also, Washington openly accuses Iran of fomenting instability in Iraq, and despite Tehran's denials, anyone coming from the Islamic republic remains automatically suspect. Even some refugees voice suspicions about their hosts. 

The Iraqis have grown angry at the lack of answers about when they might return. A team from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees had to flee one refugee camp recently after facing a hail of rocks from impatient residents.

An estimated four million Iraqis fled their country, most after the first gulf war, but only about 10 percent of them are officially classified as refugees by the United Nations. Of those, about half, or 202,000 people, live in Iran.

"Some came because their relatives were involved in politics and they feared being victimized by the Iraqi regime," said a high school teacher in the Motahari camp here. "Some came arbitrarily, just for food. Everyone here has a story."

Most of the stories involve joining the failed 1991 uprising against Mr. Hussein. Abbas Khdeir, 50, was a truck driver for the Umm Qasr Pipe Company. When the uprising started, he said, he drove his truck across the border into Iran, filled it with Kalashnikov assault rifles and drove back to Umm Qasr, handing them out in his neighborhood as part of Iran's first attempt to foment an Islamic revolution there.

"If I had stayed, I would have ended up in one of those mass graves you have seen," he said. 

Iraqis are easy to spot here. Many, like Mr. Khdeir, drive vehicles with Basra license plates. He said driving the vehicle made finding work harder in Ahwaz, because the police automatically turned it away at checkpoints. Most Iraqis in Iran subsist on jobs in construction and farming. 

Mr. Khdeir and several other refugees said they turned to the one source of sure revenue available to them: joining the Badr Brigades, the armed fighters of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

The council announced Saturday in Baghdad that it would boycott any interim administration appointed under American auspices. 

The Iraqi opposition groups that Iran sponsored defend Tehran's interest in what unrolls right next door. "Of course the Iranians want a government in Iraq that will not be an enemy," said Ali al-Adeeb, a member of Dawa, one of the Islamic opposition groups that has gradually decamped from Tehran since the Iraqi regime fell. "All the countries in the region are trying to interfere — Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey — they all have their reasons," he said. "We want to administer ourselves without any interference from outside, be it Iranian or American or any other country." 

Some refugees themselves harbor concerns that the Iranians will foment armed unrest against the American occupation forces by using the Badr Brigades. 

"We have suffered a lot from Saddam Hussein," said the schoolteacher, asking not to be named out of concern about reprisals. "The Badr Brigades belong directly to the Iranian government. If they come with their arms, they will begin to create problems. We don't want to get stuck because of their intentions."

Western diplomats here echo charges by the American and British forces next door that Iran seeks to influence events in Iraq, although they say the influence appears to consist mostly of mobilizing supporters in local political squabbles. Weapons, they point out, are readily available in Iraq and do not need to be shipped over the border. 

For its part, Iran professes only an interest in free elections in Iraq. Given Iraq's 60 percent Shiite majority, elections would be likely to create a government that would be friendly to Iran, which is dominated by Shiites.

The Iranians grumble that they have received little recognition for the services they have provided for the Iraqi refugees for 10 years with virtually no international aid. 

The Iraqi refugees, along with about 2.4 million Afghans, helped to make Iran host to the world's largest refugee population. The government has won high marks from the United Nations for the free housing, electricity, medical care and education it provided in nine camps housing about 45,000 refugees from southern Iraq. Another 11 camps house a few thousand Iraqis from the Kurdish areas. Most by far live in poor urban areas. 

At Ansar Camp, one of six in the largely Arab province of Khuzistan bordering Iraq, the official version of why there are refugees differs slightly from that offered by the residents. "They escaped because of American bombing during the first gulf war," said Alireza Nouri Gorouhi, the director of the camp, which houses more than 7,000 refugees. 

The refugees live in two-room cinderblock houses built around a small courtyard, the smell of raw sewage wafting above open drains. A sign outside the health clinic urges parents to have just two children, but the small army of young ones in the camp suggests the advice is ignored.

Most Iraqis have no homes to go back to and face only uncertainty. For Mrs. Kavarizadeh, who only got her Iranian surname when she was expelled, a nagging identity crisis deepens her unease. 

"In Iran they call us Iraqis, but they kicked us out of there," said Mrs. Kavarizadeh, whose children where educated in Farsi in the poor Ahwaz neighborhood where they live. "If we go back to Iraq, they will call us Iranians. I am miserable in this big country, but I don't know what I would do in Iraq. They confiscated everything, including our future."