OT Iraqis and the War

2003-3-19 12:00:00

Iraqi refugees living in Kansas City talk about oppression, death -- and their hopes for change By JAMES A. FUSSELL The Kansas City Star

Violent images flash from a television in an Iraqi restaurant in Kansas City's old Northeast area. On screen young Iraqi men in Baghdad jump, scream and wave their fists. One tears savagely at an American flag.

Back at the Al-Shawi Restaurant, groups of young Iraqi men gather as well. Quiet as librarians they eat kebabs and drink hot tea. Others smoke or talk. All stare hypnotically at the screen.

As they monitor satellite broadcasts from Dubai, Lebanon and Abu Dhabi, they do not smile. They narrow their eyes and watch for news of an American-led invasion. While they worry about collateral damage, they say they support President Bush and dream of the day he removes Saddam Hussein from power.

Sure, Kansas Citians worry over war in Iraq. But few worry in the same way as the area's several hundred Iraqi refugees.

Lives already torn apart by Saddam Hussein, they arrived here for a fresh start. Many got it. Numbers from the 2000 census estimate the Iraqi population in the Greater Kansas City at 250. But members of the Iraqi community put the number much higher, between 600 and 800. Many live in Kansas City's Northeast area. There they gather at mosques and in restaurants to forge a sense of community, share calls and letters from home and talk about the news of the day.

Today the topic is war.

Recently The Star asked several Iraqi refugees to share their thoughts about their lives in Kansas City and how they were feeling about the U.S./Iraqi conflict. While many wanted to talk, most were too worried about reprisals against family members here, or still In Iraq, to give their names or be photographed.

One explained his hesitancy this way: "Saddam Hussein is the devil," he said. "And that's all you have to know."

Still, a few did consent. Here are their stories.

Nasser Salehi

Nasser Salehi, 50, sat in his small, square living room in a dark blue three-piece suit. Two framed gold swords hung on his wall with several pieces of Iraqi art. Al-Jazeera, an Arabic news channel, beamed from the TV.

Surrounded by his family and several friends to help translate, he took occasional puffs of tobacco from a polished brass water pipe, and exhaled thick clouds of smoke toward the ceiling. His wife, Intissar Mahdi, and 18-year-old son, Mohamad, a senior at Kansas City's Northeast High School, sat across from him. Two younger daughters, ages 15 and 11, sat on the floor drinking soda and eating snacks.

Like many other Iraqi refugees, Salehi supports a U.S. invasion of his homeland -- but only if Hussein is stripped of the power he's held since 1979.

"All the (Iraqis) in this country are still scared of Saddam," Salehi explained through a translator. "Because Saddam has hands over here, too. I mean, who knows? He's everywhere. But we're not scared of him. He's already killed a lot of members of my family."

Eight to be exact.

A former oil driller in Basra, a large city in southern Iraq, Salehi fled Iraq before Saddam could kill him, too.

Salehi and his family have been in the United States since 2000, placed in Kansas City by a relief agency after spending time in Iran, Syria and Jordan.

Salehi hated Hussein so much he actually fought for Iran in the war against Iraq. Two older sons remain in Iraq, unable to leave. Salehi worries greatly about them but knows their fate is out of his hands.

His wife, Intissar, has had problems with Hussein as well. More than 10 years ago, following a failed post-Gulf War revolution, his security forces took her four brothers to jail. She hasn't seen or heard from them since and fears she never will. Her life is here now, making chocolates for Bitterman Family Confections, helping her children get good educations and praying that somehow her brothers are still alive.

Nasser Salehi and his family live in the Northeast area, an area that's had its problems with crime and drugs. On balance, though, he and his family think Kansas City is heaven compared to Iraq.

In Hussein's Iraq, he said, good people are routinely stopped, questioned, incarcerated, tortured and killed for no reason. His father, he said, was killed for praying in a mosque that Saddam didn't like. His mother was tortured. All of her teeth were cut out of her mouth.

Here, he said, no one stops him, or restricts where he can go, or what he can say or do. In fact, despite the dangerous picture Hussein painted about America, he has found it nothing but friendly and helpful.

The Don Bosco Center rented the family a house. The government gave them food stamps and Medicare.

"In my country nobody helps you," he said through the translator. "This country helps anybody. It's wonderful."

Today Salehi owns an automobile repair shop and is becoming more American by the day. He loves fishing at Smithville Lake and going on picnics, and he dreams of seeing more of America in one of his four cars. His son, Mohamad, has made good friends, learned to speak English and plans to work in the oil drilling industry after high school. His eldest daughter, Rokaya, 15, likes ice cream, Jackie Chan movies and music from 'N Sync and the Backstreet Boys. She wants to be a dentist. And his youngest daughter, Sokayna, 11, can't get enough of Yu-gi-oh! and Pokemon cartoons.

Salehi, who wants to become an American citizen, is committed to his new life no matter what. And as his new country comes closer to war with his old country, he thinks it important that other Americans know a few things. Islam means peace, he said. And Saddam Hussein doesn't know anything about Islam. The people of Iraq are good, and there is a huge difference between the country's people and its president.

"The people of Iraq like the people of America," he said. "And the day they take Saddam Hussein out the people of Iraq will never forget the United States."

Hama Hassan and Aveen Noori

Hama Hassan and his wife, Aveen Noori, miss many things about their lives in the Kurdish areas of Northern Iraq. The food, the faces, the weather, their lifelong friends.

Everything but the government.

Like all Iraqis, they have stories, each more horrible than the next.

Hama told a story of a young grade-school boy whose father turned off the TV when Hussein spoke. At school the boy's teacher showed a picture of the Iraqi leader and asked who it was.

"Oh, I know this guy," the boy said innocently. "Every time he comes on the TV my father turns him off."

The teacher told security forces, who found the boy's father and killed him.

Noori also has a story. She knows fathers who have killed their own sons -- after the sons escaped from the military -- to show their loyalty and keep the government from killing their entire family.

The Northland couple, part of Iraq's persecuted Kurdish minority, have many chilling stories. During the Anfal Operation, a six-month campaign of extermination against Kurdish people in the late 1980s, countless people were killed or taken away. The couple put the number in the hundreds of thousands.

Hassan and Noori were civil engineers in Iraq. Hassan also had to serve in the military for eight years. When conditions worsened after the Gulf War -- as Hussein and his army destroyed villages and incarcerated and killed Iraqi citizens after a failed revolution -- Hassan began to work with a U.N. humanitarian agency. He met Noori there. When Hussein threatened to hang any Iraqi who worked with the agencies, both were helped safely out of the country. They married shortly after they resettled in Kansas City.

Life here is not the same, they said. Freedom is wonderful, but it cannot completely replace what they lost. In Iraq they made good livings and made their home in a picturesque city in the mountains that resembles Denver.

Although the couple knows 40 families from Iraq here and is close friends with about 10 of them, there is still a void in their lives.

They want a baby.

Noori, 33, recently became pregnant, but the baby had serious problems and was lost before birth. The couple also tried in vitro fertilization, even though the practice is frowned upon in their culture.

But the couple, who had already lost their home, their country, their peace of mind and many friends and family, just wanted something to go right, something beautiful that they could love and nurture.

It hasn't been easy. In the mid-'90s the Iraqi government took Hassan's life savings -- 50,000 dinar -- the equivalent at the time of $150,000. He doesn't know why. Noori gave her savings to her family.

That made it even harder to pay for the in vitro procedures. To date they have tried five times without success. Paying $12,000 a treatment, they have exhausted their current savings.

To make matters worse, medical care is more expensive in the United States than in Iraq. And recently Noori was laid off her job at a local engineering firm.

They would adopt, but until they become American citizens, they cannot.

Between the worries over war, the safety of family and friends back home, financial pressures and the inability to have or adopt a child, Hassan, who works for a local engineering company, began having health problems. Pressure in his head sent him to one doctor. Chest pains landed him in the emergency room. After tests failed to show any problems, his doctor finally arrived at a diagnosis.

Stress.

Having a baby would help. So would regime change in Iraq.

And so every day they keep up on news from home by watching Kurdish and Arabic channels on their satellite in the living room of their split-level home. As they do, they pray, not for themselves, but for the suffering of their countrymen back home.

"In our community all we want (is for) Saddam to be out," Hassan said. "We are all here because of Saddam."

Ali Al-Moswi

Whenever Ali al-Moswi sees groups of young Iraqi men screaming and waving their fists for the camera, he has to laugh.

He used to be one of them.

He wasn't a dangerous radical out to destroy America -- the "Great Satan." He was a veterinarian. And he just trying to stay alive.

Today Moswi, 39, explains to anyone who will listen that in Hussein's Iraq, people are often forced to protest. Fail to obey and you become a target. You could be watched, put in jail, even killed.

Preferring to stay alive, he went along. But make no mistake, he said. It was all a show.

Al-Moswi, now a Kansas City cabdriver, fled Iraq after Hussein attacked Kuwait in 1991. He wound up in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, baking under the desert sun for six agonizing years. A United Nations relief agency then helped resettle him in the United States.

Today he acts as a sort of unofficial goodwill ambassador for the people of Iraq in his cab. When people find out where he's from, they have many questions.

"Most people are nice," he said. "They just want to know what's going on. I give them my phone number. If they have questions they just call me." There are exceptions, though. Once, when a male passenger learned al-Moswi was from Iraq, he said "

Oh, you are a terrorist! If I had a gun I would kill you right now, cause you're from Iraq!' But he was drunk."

Al-Moswi has no family in the United States and has never married. But he has made many friends and likes his new life here just the same.

The first place he went to in America was Chicago. It was too big, too noisy. Kansas City proved just right. Then he spent two years in St. Louis.

"I love this city," he said. "People from Kansas City are very nice."

One of his favorite places is the Al-Shawi Restaurant, at the corner of St. John Avenue and Jackson, where many Iraqi people gather. He eats there for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

"I can eat here for 3 or 4 dollars," he said.

He can also talk to his countrymen and watch news from home on the satellite.On a recent day more than a dozen men sat doing just that.

"All the people here," he said with a sweep of his hand. "Everybody, they (have had) somebody die. Maybe it's a father, a brother, an uncle. That's Saddam Hussein."

Like many refugees, he supports action in Iraq. Still, he's scared. He doesn't want innocent people to die. And he doesn't want a repeat of 1991 when the United States left Saddam Hussein in power, which lead to an internal bloodbath.

"Maybe they do the same as 1991," he said. "We hope not."