Iraqi refugees settling locally among a growing number nationwide
Baton Rouge Advocate. April 19, 2009, Page 1A.
Iraqi refugee Majed Abbas walked down the jetway into Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport on Dec. 3, the 10th anniversary of his wedding day.
His wife and three young children did not accompany him on the flight from Damascus. They were killed, he said, along with his elderly parents, almost three years earlier when Shiite insurgents burned their Baghdad home.
Abbas, 37, is one of 18,500 Iraqi refugees expected to enter the U.S. this federal fiscal year, which ends in September.
Of those, 84 have already arrived in Louisiana, 54 of them in Baton Rouge. Another 46 are expected in the state by the end of September.
Like many other Iraqis forced to flee their native land, Abbas risked his life, he said, working for the U.S.
In six years of war, 4.7 million Iraqis have been forced from their homes, according to estimates by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Some 2 million reside outside of Iraq, most in neighboring Syria and Jordan, where they are reported to be living in limbo, many unable to work or attend school.
Mohammed and Aliaa Jasim arrived in Baton Rouge with their infant daughter, Lilian, on Election Day in November.
While the Jasims both have computer science degrees, they had spent the previous few years in Jordan, where, they said, it is almost impossible for Iraqis to obtain work authorization.
After living mainly off savings and family remittances while waiting on their refugee status, they are happy to be working again. Mohammed Jasim, 30, is now a manager trainee at Tire Kingdom in Denham Springs. Aliaa Jasim, 25, works six days a week as a secretary at a car dealership on Florida Boulevard.
Mohammed Jasim said he wants to take some additional computer courses in college here and return to his field but must wait to get his foreign degree evaluated.
The jobs available to refugees are typically entry-level, even though most of the Iraqi refugees are professionals drawn from their country’s educated middle class, said Diane Chisholm, director of Migration and Refugee Services for Catholic Charities of Baton Rouge.
“You really have to start at the bottom,” Chisholm said. “You can’t just jump into an engineering job or into being a doctor. There’s all sorts of re-certification (procedures).”
Case workers at Catholic Charities, most of them former refugees themselves, act as guides to American life for the arriving refugees, Chisholm said.
Quickly finding employment is key, as the State Department allots Catholic Charities only $424 per refugee to take care of the initial expenses in setting up an apartment, she said.
While refugees elsewhere in the U.S. are struggling against the recession to get their new lives off the ground, Baton Rouge’s relatively more-robust economy — unemployment in Baton Rouge for February was 5.1 percent, compared to the U.S. average of 8.1 percent — has been kinder to the recent arrivals.
“We have the capacity, the affordable housing and we’re farther behind the recession as it relates to other states,” Chisholm said.
Almost all the refugees who have arrived in Baton Rouge this federal fiscal year have found jobs, Chisholm said.
For now, the Jasims say they are happy to have stability.
“I’m in my 30s. We just want to have a happy life, do good work and raise the babies,” Mohammed Jasim said.
That attitude is shared by many Iraqi refugees, Chisholm said.
“They’re really grateful to be here and they’re really grateful to have a job and they understand that they’re not going to be in that job forever,” she said.
Chisholm said observant Muslims among the refugees are directed to the Islamic Center of Baton Rouge, which has provided them with additional but informal assistance.
Emad Nofal, former chairman of the Board of Directors at the Islamic Center, said the mosque has helped Muslim refugees for years, whether they hail from Bosnia or Afghanistan or Iraq.
Some recently arrived Iraqis have forged connections with those in the Iraqi-American community who have lived in the Baton Rouge area for 20 or 30 years, Nofal said.
A few days after their arrival in Baton Rouge, the Jasims reconnected with an old friend of Aliaa Jasim’s uncle who has lived here since 2001. The friend helped the family find a two-bedroom house in his neighborhood and his wife watches 11-month-old Lilian during the day while the Jasims work.
Wave of sectarian violence
Many Iraqi refugees are arriving in the U.S. physically and emotionally scarred.
Abbas is both. He lost his family and was tortured, he said, over the course of one week.
In his unadorned, one-bedroom apartment south of LSU, Abbas shared his story and his hopes to create a new life for himself 7,000 miles from Baghdad.
In Iraq, Abbas, an engineer, owned a small electronics store and drove a BMW 650.
His brown-and-orange woven-plastic prayer rug, bought at a market in Damascus, is one of the few personal effects he brought with him from his old life.
A month after the March 20, 2003, invasion, Abbas began working for the U.S. at Camp Anaconda, installing air conditioners and other electronics at the base, some 70 miles north of his home in Baghdad.
“I liked the people there,” he said. “They were very kind with me and all the people in my country.”
He took careful steps to hide that he worked for the U.S. Army. When he returned to Baghdad, he would stay with a friend. His wife, Wasan, daughters, Maryam and Rasha, and son, Ammar, would visit him there.
That arrangement was working until February 2006, when the golden-domed al-Askari mosque in Samarra — one of the holiest Shiite sites in Iraq — was bombed, setting off a wave of sectarian violence.
Abbas, who is Sunni, lived in a majority Shiite neighborhood. In late February, his wife called him at the base to tell him a threatening note had been slipped under the door of their home, instructing the Sunni family to leave, or else.
Worried, Abbas secured time off from his supervisor and made his way overland to Damascus, where he rented his family an apartment.
On his return to Baghdad on March 6, 2006, he discovered all six members of his immediate family had been killed when Shiite insurgents torched his 700-square-meter home.
“My family was dead March 1, the night I arrived in Syria,” he recounted.
Abbas then set out in search of their bodies, visiting several of Baghdad’s morgues before he was abducted by a group of armed men.
The men, who he believes were members of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia because their leader spoke the Saudi Arabian dialect of Arabic, took him to a small room, where they hung him upside down by his legs.
For the next five days, Abbas said, he was tortured. His captors questioned him about his family, and called him a liar when he said they were all dead.
They broke his arm and leg and hit the side of his face with the butt of a Kalashnikov rifle, cracking his molars.
Abbas’ chest still bears the wide scars where his tormenters poured acid on him.
During the ordeal, Abbas faded in and out of consciousness.
“Sometimes I didn’t feel anything,” he said.
After five days, they left him for dead in a trash heap. He woke up in a hospital in Baghdad. Less than a month later, he made his way back to Damascus, via Kurdistan.
He never found his family’s bodies and has never been back to Iraq.
Now, Abbas is training to be a manager at Tire Kingdom in Denham Springs. He and Mohammed Jasim carpool to work together and spend much of their free time together.
The damage to his teeth requires more than $50,000 of dental work, which a local dentist volunteered to do for free after hearing Abbas’ story, said Theresa Clement, an immigrant outreach specialist with Catholic Charities.
Abbas is eager to improve his English and to make American friends. He studies from a textbook bought in Baghdad and attends English classes at Catholic Charities after work three times a week.
‘A moral responsibility’
Though one in five Iraqis is displaced, until very recently only a trickle of Iraqi refugees was granted admission to the U.S. — including the 13 Iraqi refugees taken in last year in Metairie, New Orleans and Lafayette, according to Refugees International, a humanitarian organization.
“The response to Iraqi refugees was very slow in coming,” said Bob Carey, vice president of resettlement at the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief agency based in New York. “I think there was a culture of denial in the previous administration for a long time about whether Iraqi refugees really existed.”
In 2004, 66 Iraqi refugees were allowed into the U.S. In 2008, that number grew to 13,823 and this year the U.S. is on track to admit 18,500 refugees, according to Homeland Security and State Department statistics.
Speaking at Camp Lejeune, N.C., in late February, President Barack Obama dubbed Iraq’s refugees and internally displaced persons “a living consequence of this war” and pledged to do more to assist them.
“America has a strategic interest — and a moral responsibility — to act,” he said.
This fiscal year, $80 million has been set aside in the federal budget to identify, transport and resettle Iraqi refugees into the U.S., said Andy Laine, a State Department spokesman.
Another 5,500 slots are available each year for Iraqis and Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or government contractors through the Special Immigrant Visa program.
Only 1,450 people, however, have been admitted through that avenue since its inception, Homeland Security statistics show.
More must be done, said Kirk Johnson, founder of the Iraqi List Project, a nonprofit that advocates for Iraqis who worked for the U.S. Only 350 of the 3,000 people on Johnson’s list have been admitted to the U.S.
Johnson urged the Obama Administration to seek creative solutions to ensure the Iraqis currently working for the Americans do not meet tragic ends as the U.S. draws down its presence there.
“We know what these Iraqis are facing and it’s going to be folly if we think as we scale down the Iraqis who have been working for us are going to be all right,” Johnson said.
‘They knew me by name’
In 2005, Mohammed Jasim decided to move back to Iraq from Libya, where he had lived with his family since 1992.
“I wouldn’t have gone back if Saddam (Hussein) was still ruling,” he said.
Three days after the Sunni family returned to their home in their majority Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, four fighters from radical Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army forced Jasim into a car, he said.
“They knew me by name — we hadn’t been there one week and they knew me by name,” Jasim said.
He has faint scars on his hands and forehead that he said are from being beaten with the butts of their rifles.
“After that, they gave me three days to leave the house or they would kill me,” he said.
The family returned to North Africa, but Jasim, who no longer had residency in Libya, flew to Amman, Jordan.
Legal residency in Jordan proved nearly impossible to obtain, so life there had to be lived carefully, to avoid notice by the secret police, he said.
Jasim met his future wife on the Internet and the couple was married in Aliaa’s hometown of Mosul on Feb. 14, 2007, he said. Their daughter, Lilian, was born in Jordan as they awaited resettlement.
Aliaa Jasim, now pregnant with their second daughter, said she hopes both girls will be successful in America. She wants Lilian to become a dentist.
The family often spends their Sundays strolling around the LSU lakes or on the Mississippi River levee, and Mohammed Jasim said he loves the natural beauty of south Louisiana, as well as the welcoming southern culture.
“We’re in love with the weather and the good hospitality of the people over here,” he said.
While they will always miss Iraq, the Jasims said, they are set on making a new life for themselves in Baton Rouge.
“We’ve moved a lot in our lives. We want to settle down,” Mohammed Jasim said. “There are thousands of families that had bad times (in Iraq.) I tell my wife we’re very lucky, someone brought us here.”
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