To Be a Friend Is Fatal

by Kirk W. Johnson

  As angry as I was about USAID, it had no role in the refugee resettlement process. If I spent all of my energy fighting the agency, the Iraqis on my list would get nowhere. Besides, USAID carried little political weight in Washington anymore: even if it had been a vociferous supporter of protecting US-affiliated Iraqis, it was hard to imagine much benefit.

  A week after Nouri’s assassination, I received a frantic phone call from Tona and Amina, my two former colleagues from USAID who had been photographed by a man in Iraqi police uniform as they walked out of the Green Zone. Since then, Tona had claimed asylum while on a skills-training course in Washington administered by USAID in late 2006. Amina, who had just arrived on a similar course, was desperate to do the same.

  By this point, several Iraqis working for the State Department and USAID had “defected” during these training missions. The agency was embarrassed by the defections, since the US Citizenship and Immigration Services would now need to adjudicate whether its Iraqi employees had knowingly intended to claim asylum on a short-term visitor’s visa, thus committing visa fraud. The US government spends a lot of money each year bringing in Fulbright scholars, officers in foreign militaries, professors, and many others through exchange programs intended to strengthen bonds with other countries. If everyone abused these programs as a way to emigrate to America, there would be no exchange, and the programs would be rendered pointless.

  I had no idea that Amina was coming to the United States. In a quivering voice, she told me about the man with the gun at the Qadisiyya checkpoint who had been imprisoned after Amina had alerted a nearby American soldier. Her family had called her during her training in Washington to tell her that the gunman had just been released from detention. They told her not to come home.

  “I don’t know what to do. I promised USAID that I wouldn’t stay here, but I’m scared. They will be so angry with me if I stay. And I don’t know if—”

  When I realized this young woman was still putting the wishes of a bureaucracy before her own safety, I cut her off midsentence and told her to forget about USAID. I walked her through the basic process of claiming asylum, and connected her with Chris Nugent that same night. She went to the law firm of Holland and Knight the following morning, where Chris began to draft her application for asylum.

  When she wrote to her boss at USAID to inform her about the new threat and submit a resignation letter, the executive officer back in Baghdad was furious. Amina received a scathing reply, blaming her for the negative impact her decision would have on the rest of the FSNs, USGspeak for foreign service nationals, or the Iraqis who worked for the agency:

  From: ___________ (IRAQ/EXO) [mailto:*********@usaid.gov]

  Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 1:33 AM

  To: Amina

  Subject: RE: Resignation

  Amina, given the talk I had with you last Tuesday night, I am surprised and disappointed. I thought I had made it very clear that we were placing enormous faith in you by sending you to the US and that if you failed to return it would have serious negative repercussions on the rest of the FSN staff.

  I can only hope that you do not intend to remain illegally in the US. You should know that if you do and are caught you will be deported back to Iraq as an illegal alien and turned over to the authorities.

  I wish you no ill but can not condone your deceit. May God protect you!

  Amina called me within minutes of receiving the email, past one in the morning. She was in hysterics, terrified that police would show up at her door to deport her back to Iraq. The executive officer’s reference to handing her over to the authorities suggested the new Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, which had already earned a heinous reputation for its torture rooms.

  I told her to store my number in her quick dial and that she should call anytime she was feeling scared. I was getting used to making promises I wasn’t sure I could keep, but I knew enough about asylum law to be confident that she would succeed in her application. I adopted a daily routine of checking in with her, trying to buoy her spirits.

  Once Chris had filed her asylum petition, Amina’s fears of being deported in the middle of the night subsided, leaving her with the more profound realization that she had just filed paperwork that would sever her from her homeland.

  I was angry about the way that USAID treated her, but I knew by now the pointlessness of attacking a bureaucratic hydra. People came and went, but the titles and positions and attitudes remained. The woman who sent the nasty email to her would leave Iraq in a couple months, dispatched to another part of the world to keep the locals in line there. Whoever replaced her would send the same warnings to other Iraqi employees of the agency. Until the positions—not the people holding them—received new policy instructions from on high, nothing would change.

  * * *

  A plan was emerging from my calls with Chris. I had spent so much time looking for a refugee organization to take over my list; it had never occurred to me that a law firm might help. If I could somehow find funding to defray the costs of a paralegal, Chris was optimistic that Holland and Knight would take on my list as a formal pro bono initiative. He could then train other attorneys at the firm, allowing even more Iraqis on the list to benefit from direct legal counsel. I was soon introduced to another gifted attorney named Eric Blinderman, who had worked with the Justice Department in Iraq on the trial of Saddam Hussein. Since his return to work as a litigation lawyer with the firm Proskauer Rose, he had tenaciously orchestrated the resettlement of several former Iraqi colleagues to America. He thought that Proskauer Rose might also commit to the project.

  I was at another crossroads—my biggest since drafting the op-ed that had set everything in motion six months earlier. I’d received an embarrassing number of rejection letters from law schools but had been offered a spot at the University of Michigan. My health was starting to flag as a result of the high stress of handling hundreds of refugees’ petitions. My credit card debt continued to mount. I’d been unable to find a refugee organization that could help the list in any real way.

  Still, I felt the tug to finish what I had started. If I quit, I was certain that Yaghdan wouldn’t make it to the United States. What would have been the point of all this work if I bailed on him now? I was meeting fascinating people, helping to raise awareness about a humanitarian crisis, and generally happy when I woke up each morning, despite the stress.

  I also had a pair of blue-chip law firms offering to help. Why couldn’t I just create my own organization to do what the others couldn’t?

  Though a small army of people had pledged to donate money in the wake of the media coverage, it wasn’t enough to cover the salary of a staffer. With little sense of what I was doing, I drafted a grant application and sent it off to the Tides Foundation in California. Within a few days, I was on the phone with its founder, Drummond Pike, who listened patiently as I laid out my plan to work with the lawyers. I asked him for help.

  A few weeks later, I got it. Drummond called to inform me that I would receive $175,000 from the foundation. This was on top of an additional pledge of $125,000 from an anonymous donor. I had never worked in the nonprofit world, but I knew a groundswell when I felt it.

  Before I could use any funds, though, I’d need to obtain nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. Drummond said that Tides wanted to help. Rather than wading through the slow-moving process of incorporating a nonprofit, setting up accounting and payroll systems, and all of the administrative demands necessary for any NGO, Tides functions as an incubator for people who need to get to work immediately. In exchange for a fee, all of its support and administrative services would be made available instantly. My project would receive its nonprofit status in the process, and I could maintain my focus on the list.

  I called the University of Michigan and deferred my spot in the law school for one year.

  I then called the State Department to inform it that I was mobilizing law firms to help the Iraqis on my list. The official on the other end of the lin
e paused and said, “Kirk, this is over the top. Refugees don’t need lawyers.”

  On June 20, 2007, World Refugee Day, the List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies was launched. Nearly one hundred attorneys gathered to receive training on handling Iraqi refugee cases in a constellation of conference rooms in the Washington office of Holland and Knight. In a gesture of cooperation, I invited officials from the Departments of State and Homeland Security to make a presentation to the group. In my first step as director, I hired Tona and Amina to help manage the burgeoning caseload.

  16.

  Pod 23

  Kids

  In the Hassaniyah neighborhood of the southern Iraqi city of Basrah, a father is digging a well in his backyard. He is too old for the task, made more difficult by a hip shattered long ago by a shell from an earlier war. In the front yard run rows of roses, tomatoes, and other vegetables. He knows the healthy grass carpeting the rest of the yard will soon parch and fade. Two palms and a pomegranate tree stand guard by the front gate. He curses the name of Saddam Hussein as he shovels, because there is no water in the pipes, and the Americans are coming to bomb. Inside play his two little girls, Zina and Tara, nine and ten, giddy that school has been canceled. It is 1991.

  Eyeing the dwindling supply of food in the pantry, the girls’ mother hopes that the war will be brief. She was of an earlier, more liberal era in Iraq, and had worn miniskirts in college. It was customary then for women to become teachers or nurses, but she wanted to be an accountant. Her father, of Saudi descent, wouldn’t let her move outside the province to study, so she became a teacher and waited, hoping that a university would open inside the province and offer accounting. When one finally did, she went to night school, becoming one of the first female accountants in Basrah. She made sure that Zina and Tara went to one of the best elementary schools in the province, an Armenian school in the Jaza’ir neighborhood.

  * * *

  In high school, Zina had had trouble fitting in. She scored highly on her examinations and placed into a good school, but although she had friends, she never felt comfortable. She thought she was the ugliest girl in her class, and the boys teased her because her skin was darker than that of the other girls, and her hair curled where theirs was straight. While other kids played outside, she played inside with Tara, read magazines from the 1970s, and watched American movies, their room wallpapered with posters of the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera. The 1984 teen flick Footloose looped relentlessly.

  Under Saddam, kids learned early how to disappear into the crowd, but Zina was stubborn. She questioned everything, so when people told her that Islam was the greatest, she asked why. As one of the only Sunni families in an overwhelmingly Shi’a community, her mom urged caution, but Zina didn’t worry about what people thought of her and sometimes went out of her way to demonstrate as much, clomping to school in platform shoes like the kind worn by the Spice Girls. Her classmates could judge all they wanted.

  When the regime started appropriating Islamic symbols and speech, Zina noticed more of her classmates and neighbors wearing the hijab, but to her, the headscarf felt like a prison. She grew annoyed when some of her friends said the hijab freed them from boys’ gawking eyes. Why should she have to change? She was smarter than the boys in her school but wasn’t free to do half the things they could, like go jogging or ride her bike through the street. When she looked at the pictures of her miniskirted mom when she was her age, Zina felt as though she’d been born into the wrong decade.

  College

  She scored well enough on the university admissions test to be placed on the sciences track, specializing in biology, but her mom had always said she was smart enough to be a doctor or an engineer. To shift her degree to engineering, Zina started going to night school, just like her mother had. She enrolled at the Basrah Engineering College in September 2001. Like all Iraqi students, she lived at home and commuted to school. Zina didn’t like to think about what she would do when she graduated, because the future seemed grim. As a Sunni in Basrah, she would not have the connections to find a good job like her Shi’a classmates. She didn’t know if she would ever be an engineer, but she looked at her admission to the Engineering College as proof that she was just as smart as the men who dominated the profession.

  Eighteen months later, Zina was halfway through her sophomore year, and the Americans were once again loading their weapons across the border in Kuwait. The regime issued a warning that the Americans would use chemical and biological weapons during the land invasion, so Zina and her family and everyone else on the street taped plastic over their windows and waited.

  She figured it would be another short war, maybe a month of bombing before the Americans left. Even if they knocked out Saddam, he would regroup and take over again. They all slept on the floor the night of the invasion. When it came, it turned the floor into an ocean, the blasts sending tides and waves beneath her. Her mom screamed at them to stand with their backs against the wall, but Zina was so scared that her knees started to sag. She tried to recite the verse from the Quran that one says right before dying, but she couldn’t remember the words.

  There was silence for a few hours. Then more attacks. Then silence.

  * * *

  Within a year, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army had taken over her campus, setting up a checkpoint at the university’s gate, where they searched the cars and backpacks of every student. Zina flipped through an outdated Academy Awards issue of People magazine while waiting in line at the checkpoint one morning. When a militiaman saw the glossy pages of red carpet gowns and tuxedos, he yanked it from her in a rage and dragged her to his supervisor. “She’s reading a magazine with naked infidels!” he shrieked. “She has crossed the line so badly that she should be kidnapped!” Shaken, Zina was allowed to enter her campus with a warning.

  The thrill of learning faded for Zina as the social pressures grew more caustic. Another militia member stopped her in a hallway because he felt her clothing was too tight. He cursed at her, called her things in front of passing students that nobody had ever called her, insulting her parents for raising her poorly. He demanded to know if she was Sunni or Shi’a.

  She stopped going to campus unless it was absolutely essential. All she wanted was the piece of paper conferring a degree so that she could get out of Iraq. She filled her free time by frequenting a nearby Internet café called the Farahidi Institute, which offered classes in computer programming and Photoshop.

  Marriage

  One afternoon at the Internet café, Zina received a chat invitation from a stranger through her Hotmail account. His name was Wael, he told her, and he was a foreigner working in Basrah. He was Jordanian by nationality, but his bloodline hailed from the Caucasus. “By the way,” he said, “I’m just a few computers down from you, in booth nine.” Zina walked over, slipped past the booth’s privacy curtain, and found a handsome man with gaunt, almost Germanic features. She had seen him before in the café, she realized, as he grinned through a wreath of cigarette smoke. Two walkie-talkies, a cell phone, and a pistol rested next to the computer.

  They started dating, but their meetings were confined to the Internet café. Zina did not want people to talk and didn’t want to make any mistakes. Wael worked for the British, managing a security firm that guarded the ports of Basrah. His British boss was too frightened to come to Iraq, so Wael was promoted. His deputy, a young and armed Iraqi, followed him like a shadow and waited outside the café while he talked with Zina.

  He was ten years older, thirty-one, and madly in love with her. She arranged for him to meet her mother for coffee. Zina loved Wael but acknowledged that marriage would be a way out of Iraq. All of her relatives came over to the house to celebrate their engagement on the first Friday in April 2004.

  In the evenings after the engagement, Wael came over to sit in the garden with his new fiancée. When it was time for him to return to his room at the Rasheed Hotel, Zina would walk with him past the pomegranate tree to
the gate, where his deputy stood guard. After a week, though, his mood darkened. He was much quieter than usual. After seeing a black cat wander past, he groaned, “Oh God, we’re going to hear some really bad news.” Zina laughed, but she didn’t understand what was weighing on her fiancé.

  Ten nights after their engagement party, Zina and Wael had a fight. She wanted to know why he was so distant. He wanted her to be more affectionate with him. Though she pushed against other social pressures, she was still nervous about others speaking ill of her or her family. At the end of the evening, he begged her to let him spend the night on the couch in their home, but she said no, knowing that the neighbors would surely notice. When she began to walk with him as usual toward the front gate, he told her not to walk with him all the way, so she turned back to the front door with bruised feelings.

  She didn’t call him the next day. She was hoping for him to take the first step after their fight, but after two days, he still hadn’t called. She called the hotel and asked to be patched through to his room.

  “Who are you?” demanded the receptionist.

  “I’m his fiancée. I call over here all the time.”

  “Are you sure you’re his fiancée? How do you not know?!” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wael was taken.”

  She thought the man might have been joking, but this frail hope was soon dismantled as he continued. A group of seven men in Iraqi police uniforms had entered the hotel at eleven o’clock three nights earlier, the night of Zina and Wael’s fight. They disconnected all the phones from the receptionist’s desk, raised their rifles, and asked, “Do you have any foreigners staying here?” He gave them the number of Wael’s room. They dragged him out through the lobby of the hotel without saying another word.