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Iraqis With Ties to U.S. Cross Border Into Despair
Mustafa Ahmed holds a written death threat and a letter that praises his work for ACDI/VOCA, a U.S.-funded nonprofit group for which he worked.
(Photos By Yasmin Mousa For The Washington Post)
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"I always felt like they are my family," Ibrahim said. "All my employees liked to work for the Americans. Those were the best years of my life."
By 2004, Ibrahim had started carrying a gun in her purse and had hired a bodyguard. When she entered the Green Zone, where the U.S. Embassy and American contracting firms are based, she wore a head-to-toe black abaya. Once inside, she put on jeans and running shoes.
"I changed my personality," she said.
Then, one Friday, her bodyguard was kidnapped. A few days later, his kidnappers called his family seeking Ibrahim's whereabouts. They knew she worked for the Americans.
For three days, Ibrahim and her family stayed inside their house and slept with guns beside their beds. Within a week, they fled to Amman.
That was two years ago. Since then, Ibrahim has seen scores of colleagues and friends who worked for U.S. contractors flee Iraq. "I have never heard of anybody who went to the United States," she said.
Her nephew Ammar Ibrahim, a Shiite, lived in the Sunni-dominated Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiyah, but his biggest fear was not sectarian strife. He worked at a Baghdad power plant operated by General Electric.
"There is no difference between Sunni and Shia when you work for the Americans," Ammar said. "Both sides want to kill you."
He didn't trust anyone. He hired relatives of employees to avoid meeting strangers. Each day, he traveled a different route to and from the plant to avoid suffering the same fate as his aunt's bodyguard. He always hid his GE identification card in case he was stopped. "Even my closest friends didn't know I worked with the Americans," he said.
Eleven months ago, when the contract expired, the slim, serious 25-year-old engineer arrived in Amman. He applied for resettlement and in June interviewed with a U.N. refugee officer. Ammar pulled out his GE identification card and expressed his hope of going to the United States. The officer, he said, hardly glanced at his card.
"He didn't care," Ammar said. "It was irrelevant to him."
In a situation in which virtually every Iraqi has a history of misery, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees gives priority to such people as victims of abduction and torture, and those in dire need of medical care. More than a quarter of the referrals for resettlement in the United States this year were women put at risk by the war, U.N. officials said.
