REFUGEE STRENGTH
Today's Dallas Morning News features this story on a local Kurdish expat who's joined hundreds of other Iraqi expats helping the U.S. effort to oust Saddam. Todd Bensman writes:
RICHARDSON—A 20-year-old photo that hangs on a wall of the Haji family's comfortable suburban home offers a telltale glimpse of a long and tragic drama. The picture shows a young, lean Karim Haji as an anti-Saddam Hussein guerilla fighter, clasping an AK-47 in the hills of the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq.
At the time, dozens of Mr. Haji's clansmen and relatives, including a beloved brother, had been murdered, gassed and repeatedly driven from their homes in the Iraqi dictator's zeal to suppress all perceived threats to his hold on the country.
Mr. Haji is 46 now, a bit thicker in the middle after a decade of comfortable North Texas living, the father of seven children and husband of a wife grateful for his opportunity to make a decent living as a gas station manager. But Mr. Haji practically bolted from the comforts of his adopted home when presented recently with a chance to don a military uniform once more for a final confrontation with his old nemesis.
The Richardson resident is, until very recently, was stationed in Kuwait with American soldiers preparing for invasion. Mr. Haji is one of dozens of Dallas-area Kurdish and Iraqi expatriate civilians—hundreds nationwide—who have volunteered to help American soldiers wage war and peace as translators, POW guards, guides and in post-conflict humanitarian aid operations....
The effort includes thousands of Kurds and Iraqi Shiite Muslims who accepted preferential immigration terms extended to them in 1991 after the disastrous defeats of their American-encouraged rebellions against Mr. Hussein. Those expatriate communities, including an estimated 7,000 in North Texas, comprise rare enclaves of Americanized, multilingual Muslims who support war against Iraq's regime.
Kurdish exiles are everywhere in the U.S., even in Dalton, Georgia, where my pal Charles Oliver profiles 26-year-old Dara Rasheed.
"One hundred percent of the Kurdish people hate Saddam. They call him Hitler 2," Rasheed said.
In 1988, Saddam attacked the Kurdish village of Halabjah with poison gas, killing 5,000 people.
"That village was an hour from where I lived," Rasheed said.
Some Americans don't realize just how brutal Saddam is, Rasheed said. He said that Saddam will force the families of his enemies to watch as they are executed.
After the first Gulf War, Rasheed's father worked for an international agency helping to rebuild the Kurdish villages Saddam had destroyed.
The family heard that Saddam's forces had threatened to kill all those who had worked for Western agencies if he came back into control of northern Iraq.
So the family fled to the United States. They first chose to go to Chattanooga because family friends already lived there. They eventually settled in Dalton, after hearing about it from other friends.
[Posted 3/21.]