Shazli, 45, had borrowed heavily to gather the E£10,000 ($1,600) that he needed for a visa and contract. He left his small village near Qalyub, a few miles north of Cairo, in October fully expecting to return with a large amount of savings for his five-member family.

His family never saw him alive again. Late last month his body was returned after he had been shot dead in Iraq by unidentified armed men.

“My husband left saying that this would be the end of our financial troubles. He knew his job might involve working in Iraq, but he never thought that it would be too dangerous,” his wife, Zainab Ramadan, said.

In July, Ramadan received a short letter from Qalyub police authorities, breaking the news that her husband had been killed when his food truck convoy had been attacked in Iraq by a group of armed men.

After much effort by Ramadan, his corpse arrived later. It had been pierced with several bullets.

“No local official cared to visit us and offer any kind of support – even a few words of comfort,” Ramadan told the Middle East Times , sitting and crying as she held a picture of her husband.

Shazli’s brother, Mustafa, said he asked the Egyptian foreign ministry to help them get compensated by the Kuwaiti company. But the company had not offered insurance to Shazli.

“The ministry said all they could do was give us a death certificate,” said Mustafa, adding that the certificate they obtained did not even state the cause of death.  

An official at the foreign ministry confirmed Mustafa’s story but refused to comment on it.

Shazli was one of some 2 million Egyptians, who the mobilization and statistics agency estimates are working in the oil-rich Gulf region. In Iraq alone, the agency reckons the number at between 30,000 and 65,000.

Few Egyptians abroad have life insurance.

“The workers who work in the Gulf without life insurance cannot get compensation,” said an analyst at Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies who asked not to be named.

“Companies freely send uninsured workers to dangerous places knowing that they will have no liability toward their families if they are injured or killed.”

But the killings and kidnappings of drivers are having an affect.

Companies are finding it more difficult to get drivers to transport food and fuel to Iraq.

Video footage showing Turkish driver Murat Yuce being shot in the head has scared away hundreds of truck drivers despite the good wages being offered.

“In the past companies could hire a truck driver for only $300,” Ahmed Mohsen Al Karkhi, an official with Iraq’s Land Transportation Association, told Al Quds newspaper. “But now it is a different matter. Every trucker thinks twice whether to drive all the way into Iraq with food or fuel [mainly for the US military].”

According to Mustafa, Shazli was told by the Kuwaiti company that he would be needed to drive food trucks from Kuwait to Syria.

Although he was disappointed to be told to drive into Iraq instead of Syria, Mustafa Said, he was too tempted to say ‘no’ when offered almost $1,000 for each truck of food he took to the US occupation forces there.

In the last phone call to his wife on July 9, Shazli said that his group of drivers had decided not to go again to Iraq after fellow Egyptian trucker Muhammad Ali Sanad was kidnapped along with three Kenyans and three Indians by an armed Iraqi group.

Ramadan claims that the Kuwaiti company deceived his truck convoy, which led to his death.

“The company said they were going to Syria on a new road,” she said. “Instead, the Kuwaiti lead driver led their trucks into Iraq where my husband was murdered.”

Ramadan said her husband’s colleagues confirmed that he is the tenth Egyptian driver to die in Iraq and that they all worked for the same company.

A source at the manpower ministry confirmed their deaths to the Middle East Times . The source said his ministry had blacklisted a number of Gulf companies that hired Egyptians to work in Iraq for not providing them with life insurance coverage.

“Despite the obvious dangers, the number of Egyptian drivers to that area has noticeably increased in recent months. We are making sure that they do not work in Iraq without permission from the Egyptian labor body there,” the source told the Middle East Times .

However, this has all come too late to help the Shazli family. Deeply in debt without husband and father, jewelry or money, and the small plot of land they used to own, Ramadan is in despair.

“Do we not have the right – I mean the 10 widows and their children – to get something to help us to survive?” she pleaded.