Homesick and eager to be back with his wife and four small children in Basra, Abdulla was giving up his refugee status as he boarded a crowded Iraqi Airways flight from Berlin’s Tegel Airport to Baghdad that would whisk him and 150 other disillusioned former refugees back home in five hours.

He had scraped together his last $325 for the flight to Iraq — a small fraction of the money he had paid to smugglers last summer to get to Germany by foot, bus and boat through Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and Austria.

But now, after more than 1.1 million refugees from troubled lands such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have trekked into Germany over the last 13 months, a small but growing number are heading home.

The reasons are myriad, but include overcrowded refugee centers, exasperating bureaucracy, unfamiliar German food, a lack of jobs and a spreading sense of resentment from Germans who fear their country is being overrun by Muslims