LSS in the News

Iraqis forge a new life in Worcester

February 11, 2009

Worcester Telegram & Gazette

WORCESTER — Yosra Nasir knew her family had to flee Iraq when, after many threatening telephone calls, gunmen shot her young son in the leg during a kidnapping attempt on a Baghdad street in 2004.

Saba Al Khadady’s brother was kidnapped. The Islamic extremists who snatched the petrified boy gave the family 24 hours to clear out of their Baghdad home, she said.

Suha Abdula and her husband, a Baghdad liquor store owner, were threatened with death if they didn’t convert to Islam. Mr. and Mrs. Abdula locked themselves in their home and only went out after dark, and even then by climbing over a back wall, rather than risk being seen leaving by the front door.

Mazin Alwan was a clerk in the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad when terrorists exploded a truck bomb outside the building in August 2003, killing the top U.N. envoy in Iraq. Mr. Alwan went to work as a contractor for the U.S. Army and narrowly escaped injury or death three more times when insurgents opened fire on his car, he said.

Mrs. Abdula and Miss Al Khadady are cousins, but none of the other families had met before being sent to Worcester as refugees beginning in 2007.

Amid the terrifying mayhem of ransom demands, executions, suicide bombings and reprisals that came after U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, the four families each decided at different times to pack up whatever they could fit in their cars and drive 12 hours to the Jordanian or Syrian borders. Years later, they remember the dates and exact times, always in the dead of night, that they abandoned their homes to encroaching militants.

Barred from working legally in Jordan or Syria, the formerly middle-class families then languished for years in squalid hovels. Slimy green mold coated their walls. Once-comfortable professionals and merchants fell to barely eking out an existence working under the table, at the risk of deportation back to Iraq.

Like tens of thousand of Iraqi refugees, they applied for resettlement under a U.N. program and waited.

Mrs. Abdula was three months pregnant when she and her husband fled Iraq. She gave birth to two sons during the three years they lived in Amman, Jordan. Her husband eventually was caught working illegally and spent three days in jail without his medication for high blood pressure.

Mrs. Abdula, 35, who had been a computer programmer in Baghdad, turned hysterical when authorities refused to get her husband’s medication to him. “I am crying. I am screaming, ‘Please just give him his medicine,’ ” she recalled.

Mrs. Abdula pleaded with U.N. officials for help, and the family was offered resettlement in the United States. They were sent to Worcester in September 2007. The Abdulas and their children were the first of what has since become more than 100 Iraqi refugees coalescing into the city’s newest immigrant community.

Lutheran Social Services of New England is one of the nonprofits contracted by the U.S. State Department to set up arriving refugees in new homes across the country. The agency’s local staff struggles to arrange for apartments and some basic furniture for the arriving families on a one-time government payment of $475 per person.

The agency has been told to expect another 160 or so Iraqi refugees over the course of this year. A number of the refugees here so far are Sunni Muslims, who, like many Shias, were driven from their homes at gunpoint as extremists from both sects carved out enclaves in Baghdad.

Mr. Alwan is Muslim. The Abdulas, Nasirs and Al Khadadys and many of the other Iraqi refugees being resettled in Worcester are Mandaean, members of an ancient Christian sect that suffered systematic religious persecution after Saddam Hussein’s secular dictatorship fell.

The Nasirs arrived in the city in December after four years of exile in Jordan. Mrs. Nasir, 42, was a primary school teacher in Baghdad. Her husband was a goldsmith. They have three children, ages 18, 16 and 10. Her middle child was shot in the kidnapping attempt.

“I don’t miss my home,” Mrs. Nasir said. “Everything was checkpoints and explosions. How do I miss?”

The Al Khadady family arrived in Worcester last May.

Miss Al Khadady, 29, has a master’s degree in computer science. She was a lecturer at a Baghdad university before the war. She left Iraq with her mother, two sisters and brother in August 2004 following her brother’s kidnapping.

After the boy was released, the family got a chilling ultimatum. “They say, ‘You can leave the house without taking anything or you can convert to be a Muslim,’ ” Miss Al Khadady recalled.

The family left with only the clothes they had on and spent four years in Damascus, Syria, living in abject poverty most of that time, she said.

“You can’t imagine how much happy I am now. Everything I dream of I found here,” she said.

One of the newest members of the city’s Iraqi community is Mr. Alwan, the former U.N. clerk, who arrived with his wife and two children a few weeks ago.

The 42-year-old grew up listening to Voice of America radio broadcasts. He speaks fluent English with an American accent and has a bachelor’s degree. After years of enforced idleness in Jordan, Mr. Alwan said, he hopes to find work soon, despite the ailing economy, to provide for his family and to feel productive again.

“In Jordan, you don’t have any opportunity to find a job because you don’t have a work permit. You just stay home. There’s no hope for the future,” Mr. Alwan said. “When I come to the U.S., at least there’s opportunity. At least I can go and ask for a job.”

Mrs. Nasir said her children have made friends in Worcester schools and she feels welcome here. While she doesn’t miss the bloodshed of Iraq or the despair of Jordan, she pines for two brothers still in Baghdad.

Asked how long it has been since she’s heard from them, Mrs. Nasir drew in a deep breath. “A long time,” she said in a low voice after a pause.

Miss Al Khadady conceded the irony in making a new life in the country that set into motion events that forced her to flee from her old life, but she doesn’t dwell on it.

“We had a life there. I miss my life there. I miss my friends. I miss the streets. Everything,” she said. “But this country provides safety. I wasn’t safe in Iraq. I’m grateful to be here. We got a new home.”

Contact Thomas Caywood at tcaywood@telegram.com.