Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist (14 page)

I would liken Iraq’s plight to the American Indian. I remember being so embarrassed when I learned in history that America seized land belonging to someone else through a planned and systematic genocide of its native people and once they were hopelessly defeated, caused their survivors to be dependent by stealing their land, annihilating their primary food source and introducing our diseases to which they had no immunity.

The Muslims didn’t start a war with America, money and greed did. We have used America’s definition of terror as our only way of fighting back, because we don’t have sophisticated jets that carry 800 lb. laser guided bombs, or destroyers that fire laser guided cruise missiles or a trained, well equipped army that can empty a land of life with turbine powered tanks, night vision technology and helicopters that carry enough fire power to destroy a small army. Iraq has always been a tribal people, with a rich heritage that can be traced back to the beginning of time.

I was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1963. My father Harry was a Harvard educated American doctor and my mother Islee received her PhD from John Hopkins and worked as a scientist for a major pharmaceutical company. I was baptized when I was 2 months old at the First United Methodist Church in downtown New Haven and was raised in a conservative family in an upper-class environment, deprived of nothing. My parents, both having degrees from prestigious universities, were very strict with my education and sent me to the best private schools in the Northeast. Then upon my insistence, because I wanted to explore the international world, to Queen Ethelburga’s boarding school in York, England, when I was 13 years old. I inherited the fair skin and name of my father, and growing up in the Northeast gave me a genuine “Yankee” accent. I had an American name, an American look and an American tongue, I did not have a hint of my mother’s dark complexion or Middle Eastern features. I have always been a right-brained person and my education concentrated on mathematics and the sciences. My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps in medicine, and my mother acquiesced, but there were several awakenings that led me down a different path. When I think about it, what’s most interesting is that my father and my mother know so little about me, and I’m sure would testify under oath that I would never do anything as radical as what I’ve done because I was moderate in both my religious and political views.

I was always amazed at my mother’s complete lack of interest in her lineage, even though she was born and spent the first 18 years of her life in Iraq. I would almost have to force her to talk about her heritage, as if she was ashamed and was trying to erase her upbringing completely from her memory. This only made me more curious and made me believe there was a good deal for me to explore in Iraq. So in spite of my mother’s objections, when I was sixteen years old, during my summer break, I contacted my Uncle Tariq, who was more than happy to host my visit and introduce me to my lost family of aunts and uncles and cousins. I flew on a British Airways jet from London Gatwick to Baghdad and got reconnected with 5000 years of my heritage.

My Uncle Tariq and his family lived in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains about 100 miles north of Baghdad, just south of the city of Kirkuk. He was a highly educated man who lived a very simple and religious life. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Baghdad in chemical engineering and to my surprise went to the University of Wisconsin to receive his PhD. My uncle was a bald, pudgy man in his early forties, with gray streaks on his remaining hair and bushy white eyebrows. He wore large silver rim glasses and worked for a national oil production center in Kirkuk. He wore the traditional dress called an Abaya, with a long white outer garment, a red and white head piece (that looked like something we would put over a picnic basket) fastened to his head with a braided black rope. He looked quite comfortable and thought it funny when I told him that it must be nice to go through the day in his pajamas. I asked him if he also slept in his Abaya. Uncle Tariq giggled again, seeming to enjoy the naivete of an American teenager and then explained to me that everything in Iraq had a tradition and the practicality of this type of dress came from the Bedouins who found it the most suitable dress for the Iraqi desert.

Uncle Tariq and I immediately found a lot in common, because we both loved to learn, each being equally interested in the other’s lifestyle. I was interested in learning as much as I could about his culture and tradition and he, already understanding America, was curious about how the next generation of young Americans perceived his world. Being completely outside of my comfort zone made everything seem new and adventurous and I often felt that I was being obnoxious with all of my questions, but he was never impatient and didn’t seem to mind taking the time to help me understand. Uncle Tariq certainly had his eccentricities. The first evening I was there I saw him listening and talking back to an old cassette recorder. I snuck up behind him and listened as he worked with a teaching aid learning Chinese. It sounded and looked pretty funny, a middle aged Iraqi in an Abaya parroting broken Chinese back to a machine. I started to laugh, almost uncontrollably. I guess I startled him and he fumbled trying to turn off the machine, nearly knocking it onto the floor. He acted as if he was embarrassed, as if I had caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. When he collected himself, he explained that he was trying to learn Chinese from these tapes he had purchased through a magazine and it wasn’t going very well. “Tough language,” he said. “Much tougher than some of the others.” I asked him how many languages he knew and he told me that he was fluent in several of the local dialects, many that I had never heard of, and he was also competent in 6 international languages, including English. I then asked him if he had learned all the languages from tapes, to which he laughed and replied, “Chinese is the first and probably the last. It is much easier at the university, with real people who talk back to you and correct you.”

“Why do you need to know so many languages?” I asked. “And who are you ever going to talk to from China? I haven’t seen many Chinese restaurants around and I’m guessing if there were they would have to speak Arabic. How would you say Moo Shu Pork in Arabic?”

He smiled, as if remembering America and all the different cultures and cuisines, perhaps wishing that there was a Chinese restaurant in Kirkuk, so he could practice his new skill. He then got quite serious and explained to me as a father, “The world is getting smaller and more international every day and people had better start paying attention to China. Maybe not in my lifetime, but they will be the next world superpower and it just might be important to know their language. But apart from all that, you know what I like most of all?”

“To learn?” I guessed.

He put his arm around me and said, “You and I are two peas in a pod. That is an American expression, I believe.”

I nodded and smiled.

My Uncle Tariq was full of surprises. I was absolutely amazed that he knew more about American history and politics than I and he constantly reminded me that I needed to be more vigilant with issues that affected my life. He would embarrass me by asking the names of legislators and prospective international legislation that would affect not only Iraq but any nation in the Middle East and even the world. I only knew a few of the answers, but he knew them all.

He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me towards him, looking directly into my eyes.

I instinctively pulled back.

“This is how an Iraqi talks to someone when it is important,” he explained. “It is important that we touch and look into each other’s eyes to know that we are telling the truth.”

I surrendered to the custom, even though it seemed uncomfortable. He continued with his lesson on democracy.

“If you don’t understand the law,” he explained, “then what good is democracy? You don’t even know what you’re voting about.”

All in all he was quite pleased with Iraq’s relationship with the United States and thought Ronald Reagan to be a solid ally and a pretty good President.

During that first visit I learned that virtually every one of my preconceived ideas about Muslims was wrong. Somehow I thought that the people in Iraq would be aloof and mean to Westerners. However, the people I met in Kirkuk were very kind to me and respectful of my ways, even though my customs were very different. I was impressed at the deep respect they showed for each other and the absence of the Western pushiness that always annoyed me whenever I saw an American bullying their way through another country. The Americans always stuck out to me like a sore thumb, because invariably they would be the ones hollering or pushing, or complaining. There was only courtesy and respect shown for each other in Kirkuk and I tried my best not to let any of my capitalistic tendencies surface and disrupt the serene Eastern harmony of this peaceful society.

My biggest disappointment was how far behind Muslims were when it came to women’s rights. Women were definitely subordinate to men, could show only the amount of skin specified by their spouse, and they were usually less educated. Although it was not often practiced, women could be subjected to polygamy. My uncle explained that in the Muslim religion a Muslim man can take up to 4 wives as long as he has the financial means to treat them all equal. Equal means 4 equal homes, 4 equal automobiles, 4 equal allowances, etc. Uncle Tariq made very light of it all, saying that nearly all the men treated the women as equals anyway and that only the very rich could afford more than one wife, but even then most wouldn’t because as he put it, “it’s difficult enough to handle one woman.”

Uncle Tariq was the most intriguing, most spiritual and most intelligent man I had ever met. Part of this was due to the fact that I was a wild-eyed sixteen year old that had never met anyone like him, but it was mostly because he was truly a unique human being. I struggled to find elements of my mother in his mannerisms but there were none and if I hadn’t known different, I would never have believed that they were brother and sister. Everything about them was different. My mother was a staunch Republican about as far to the right as the right will go. Uncle Tariq was an apolitical Sunni Muslim who was sympathetic to the Iraqi Kurds, believing that they deserved their own homeland. He was extremely aggravated with the conservative Baath party and Saddam Hussein, who was a Sunni. He believed Hussein to be an animal who was a Muslim in “word only” and worse than the worst politician of the Western world. You might wonder as I did how a religious person affiliated with a conservative sect such as Sunni Muslim could possibly be a liberal, but I soon learned that Muslims had fundamentalists (right wing) and moderate (left wing) groups just like Christians, only instead of separating themselves by denominations, they held their beliefs individually and shared them only with their inner circle of friends. Of course there are extremists in every culture and the extremists were different, but during my entire time in Iraq I never met a radical or revolutionary person. That would come later.

Uncle Tariq worshipped his God every day at a Mosque in Kirkuk and worshipped the earth through his love for nature as he walked each morning in the mountains. At first I couldn’t believe that he would get up every day at 4 a.m., put on his hiking gear and drive 30 minutes to a national park that was the entrance to several hiking paths into the Zagros Mountains. One day, due to my inability to sleep and out of sheer curiosity, I decided to go with him.

“Are you sure you want to come with me?” he asked as he laced up his hiking boots. “The trails are pretty challenging.”

I nodded, still half asleep and answered, “I want to see what you see.”

“Do you really?” he answered. “Curiosity killed the cat. Isn’t that another of your sayings? You are too young to see what I see, nor would I want you to see everything that I see. Life needs to unfold for you in stages, through joy and suffering that is the only way we truly see. But this day you can come and we’ll see if we can’t add to your experiences.”

As the sun rose over the mountains, I could tell that he thoroughly enjoyed my company but seemed fearful that I would not have the same respect for the land that he found to be so special. He spoke in a reverent whisper and was careful to introduce me to the mountain and almost waited for me and his special friend to recognize and accept each other. When I stopped and looked and listened, I could feel the power of the earth and the wind and the smells and I was humbled by the vast beauty of the rugged terrain. By the look on his face, I could see that Uncle Tariq was not totally convinced, but was pleased, so I thought that I must be gaining acceptance by his invisible friend. I wanted more than anything to be fully welcomed into his world. As we walked, he never stopped talking, still with a soft tone. I listened, afraid to ruin the moment with the sound of my inexperienced and naive voice. He seemed to know every inch of the mountain, including every indigenous plant, rock, bird and reptile. He was interrupted several times by sounds from the mountains, once by shrill laughter from a distant valley. “Hyenas,” he explained. “They’re warning us to stay away, even though they wouldn’t hurt us, but they certainly would eat us if we were wounded or dead. They’re more afraid that we would hurt them, or perhaps steal whatever bit of snake or deer they might be munching. Beautiful, misunderstood animal, the hyena, the ultimate in survivors. ”

As we came to an intermediate summit, he looked over the panoramas with pride as a father would look back at his children and grandchildren, knowing that his seed was a part of it all.

“This is the beginning of all civilization,” he said as we looked from the mountains toward the river he pointed out to be the Tigris. “It all began here. You have probably read in your Bible about the Garden of Eden and the ancient empires of Babylon and Mesopotamia. Right now they’re all in your backyard. Everywhere you look you will see history. Go dig in that field or any field and you will find an artifact from an ancient civilization, the remnants of kings. The dust of Iraq is the dried bones and architectural columns of at least 8,000 years. We can trace our ancestors back over 7000 years.” He shuddered as he connected the past with the present. “Unfortunately, Saddam Hussein has now mixed into the soil the bones of innocent men and women, desecrating our sacred land. If the fields around Baghdad or Takrit could talk, they would be screaming of murder and crying for vengeance. I don’t know why we can’t live in peace.”