To Be a Friend Is Fatal (23 page)

He did not burn his badges. He needed them to get into the Green Zone one last time to ask for help. Before he walked out the gate, he told Haifa not to open the door for anyone, not to call anyone, and not to walk by the windows even once.

Yaghdan folded the note into his pocket. The air was foul from the rotting dog. He took a deep breath and flung open the steel gate to the street, not knowing if the authors of the threat were waiting on the other side. He hurried to the Green Zone.

Forty-five minutes later, he entered the USAID compound and headed to the corner office of the Hammurabi Office Building. He strode in, pulled the note from his pocket, and placed it on the desk of Sandy, the executive officer who was given to calling Iraqi staffers either Ahmed or Mohammad. “I need help!” he exclaimed as she peered up from her in-box. She stared at the Arabic on the threat letter and looked up at him blankly.

“It says, ‘We will cut off your head!' ”

Sandy told him to wait at his desk while she talked with the mission director.

Yaghdan knew about the empty houses in the compound. Several months earlier, when USAID was struggling to finish its annual report on time and needed his help, they had Yaghdan move into one of the houses for over a week until it was finished. The State Department had been encouraging USAID officers to move over to the new embassy compound, which meant even more vacancies. He thought they might let him live there for a couple months while he and Haifa had a chance to change neighborhoods.

Tona and Amina and his other Iraqi colleagues had sensed something was amiss as soon as he walked in. He told them about the threat, and they murmured. He sat at his cubicle and waited for something to happen. He worried about Haifa. What was he doing here? Why did he leave her alone?

The regional security officer, the man with the polygraph machine, called Yaghdan into the safe room of the building and closed the heavy door behind them. Inside, he found the mission director and the executive officer.

The RSO told him that he needed to get out of his house immediately. Yaghdan asked to move into the compound. They must have anticipated this request, since it was declined without hesitation. There just wasn't any way to make that happen, they told him.

What
could
they do for him, then, he asked. The EXO chirped that he could have one month of unpaid leave, which was the vacation time he had earned over nearly three years of service to the agency. If he had
not resolved his “problems” by the end of the month, they would give his job to somebody else.

He felt as though he were being fired. Could they help him get out of Iraq? “Oh no,” they said. “USAID doesn't control any part of the immigration process.”

As he made his way through the Assassins' Gate checkpoint, everything inside him felt tight. Haifa was surely wondering if he was still alive and how much longer she should wait before calling her family for help. He walked as quickly as he could over the bridge without breaking into a jog. He no longer cared who was on the other side; he had already been discovered, after all. The implication was only beginning to take shape: he and Haifa would flee Iraq. They would drive south to Karbala', where Haifa's father lived, but would not stay for long: the longer they stayed, the more they put extended family at risk.

On the other side of the bridge, he took the first of three taxis and eventually hopped out at the end of his street. He walked nervously toward his gate. To his relief, he found it shut, without any signs of break-in. His voice was thin, hollowed out, as he called Haifa, who raced over from the living room and smothered him in a relieved hug. The bags were by the door, waiting.

Yaghdan awoke with a start. He kept having the same dreams, always of a bearded man in a suit. The man in a suit was dragging someone by a rope down to the banks of the Tigris. There were other men nearby with guns, laughing. He saw the face of the person being dragged, and it was his own, and he woke up. The first night after he and Haifa fled, he'd slept for sixteen hours straight, but now the man with the beard kept tormenting him.

But he was no longer by the Tigris. He had paid a couple thousand dollars for temporary business visas to fly into the United Arab Emirate of Sharjah, where they rented a small apartment. They had a month before they would be asked to leave.

He and Haifa went out on long walks together. They went to the cineplex and felt free to wander in peace for the first time in distant memory. There was electricity, clean water, air-conditioning, and people on the street who had never seen war. Even without the death threat waiting for them back home, this might have been enough to convince them not to return to Iraq.

But the idyll of their life in the costly emirate was soon overclouded by the impermanence of the situation. Even if they managed to bribe their way to a pair of long-term visas, they couldn't afford to live in Dubai. They would have to leave again, and they had only one option remaining: Syria, where, due to lax visa requirements, more than a million other Iraqis had poured in since the bombing of the Al-Askari shrine in Samarra earlier that year.

As Haifa repacked their things, Yaghdan ducked into an Internet café down the street, paid a few dirhams for a connection, and began to write an email to me.

Question 19

A child eating alphabet soup notices that the only letters left in her bowl are one each of these six letters:
T
,
U
,
W
,
X
,
Y
, and
Z
. She plays a game with the remaining letters, eating them in the next three spoonfuls in accord with certain rules. Each of the six letters must be in exactly one of the next three spoonfuls, and each of the spoonfuls must have at least one and at most three of the letters. In addition, she obeys the following restrictions:

The
U
is in a later spoonful than the
T
.

The
U
is not in a later spoonful than the
X
.

The
Y
is in a later spoonful than the
W
.

The
U
is in the same spoonful as either the
Y
or the
Z
, but not both.

19. If the
Y
is the only letter in one of the spoonfuls, then which one of the following could be true?

a. The
Y
is in the first spoonful.

b. The
Z
is in the first spoonful.

c. The
T
is in the second spoonful.

d. The
X
is in the second spoonful.

e. The
W
is in the third spoonful.

The fates lead him who will; him who won't, they drag.

—Seneca

Y
aghdan's message was addressed to a part of me that I had choked off: the part that had piloted me from my hotel window, that still cared about what was happening in Iraq. Nearly a year had passed since my fall.

I read it in ten seconds and then clicked through my other emails.
Poor bastard
. There was certainly nothing I could do. He was halfway around the world, and I didn't know a thing about helping refugees. His email soon slipped from the home page of my in-box; I had law school applications to finish. It was early November 2006, and I was fast approaching the submission deadlines. I had run out of money and had moved into a small room in my aunt's house in Brighton, a hardscrabble town on the western edge of Boston.

Late one night two weeks later, I received a note from an Australian friend named Ann Vitale, who had worked in the education office alongside Yaghdan.

From: Ann Vitale

Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 12:00 AM

To: Kirk W. Johnson

Subject: RE: Happy Thanksgiving!

I don't know if you heard but Yaghdan has had to leave Iraq. A severed dog's head was thrown over his wall with a note attached saying that next time it would be his head.

Poor guy. I have set up a fund to help him, and many of my friends and family are donating to it. Once I've a substantial amount, I'll send it to him. I'm trying other means of getting him out, but of course that is not easy and the queue is miles long.

Anyway, hope you have fully recovered from last December's shocking injuries.

-ann

Shame pounded against the levee and flooded in. Here was an Australian trying to make something happen in a situation for which her country wasn't even responsible. I stared at the law-school-related correspondence in my in-box, embarrassed. I hadn't even bothered to respond to his email. Her modest proposal to raise funds for him suggested something astonishingly basic: of course I could do something more than summoning a few seconds of pity.

I crawled into bed but knew I wouldn't be able to sleep. My mind was surging. I flipped the light back on, cleared stacks of admissions essay drafts from the desk, and pulled out a fresh legal pad. At the top, I wrote “Yaghdan.”

I didn't have any money left to send him, but I had a few connections to people who might be able to help him. I began scrawling names. “Hastert.” Surely the Speaker of the House would be able to do something. Although I hadn't been in touch with him since the Amtrak call earlier that summer, I thought he might be receptive.

Below “Hastert,” I listed names of journalists I'd met through my public affairs job at USAID. I wrote “Op-ed.”

A plan began to take shape. My excitement bubbled from a forgotten place, hidden beneath a year of self-loathing, self-pity, self-recrimination, self-everything. Here was something I could do for someone else. If I could help Yaghdan make it to safety in America, I might finally have accomplished something concretely good.

I filled several pages that night, working until four in the morning. In a few hours, I had generated so much work for myself that I could hardly wait for sunlight to come to get started. When I finally crawled back into bed and closed my eyes, I felt, for the first time in a year, eager.

The next morning, I called up a senior staffer at Hastert's office. His listlessness was evident. The Republicans had been drubbed in the 2006 midterm elections, and though Hastert had been reelected, the Speakership had been lost to the Democrats. His staff was preoccupied with packing up its offices and revising resumes. He feebly promised to make some calls on my behalf and hung up.

I wrote to T. Christian Miller, the
Los Angeles Times
reporter, and asked if he would put in a word for me with the editors at the op-ed page of the paper. A day later, I received a warm invitation to submit
a piece. I had never written an op-ed before, but the words erupted as soon as I began. I spent hours reading through the basics of the US refugee admissions process, mapping out the key players in the Bush administration, and soon had drafted a piece that called upon the government to grant visas to Iraqis like Yaghdan—whom I referred to as
Y
in order to protect his identity.

Having run out of time on their short-term visa in the UAE, Yaghdan and Haifa had moved to Syria, one of the few countries still permitting Iraqi refugees to enter. In the few weeks since he fled, the only plan he'd devised was to look for a job in another USAID mission somewhere in the region, hoping that his training in the agency's procedures and systems would boost his chances.

So when I wrote back to him with an excited outline of the plans I'd developed, his reply was nervous; he didn't want to harm his chances at working for USAID again. “I don't think an article about this will help. It will make USAID very angry. But I trust you.”

I didn't want to undermine his plans to work for the agency again, but I knew that there was no way that anyone would pay attention to his plight if we were deferential or overly polite to the US government. I thought about my own departure from USAID, and how quickly irrelevant I had become to the mission. And I was an American, on senior staff. “I won't publish this if you strongly object,” I wrote, “but I think you are wrong. Nobody will help you in the government if they are not pressured to do so.”

His response came quickly: “I trust you. Go ahead and publish it.”

On December 15, 2006, under the headline “Safeguarding Our Allies,” my piece appeared in the
Los Angeles Times,
the first major newspaper to run an op-ed about the plight of US-affiliated Iraqis. Though ten months had passed since the destruction at Samarra and the subsequent eruption of civil war, the discussion in the media centered on bombs and not the aftermath of human displacement. More than three million Iraqis had been uprooted by violence, the region's largest refugee crisis in sixty years, but pundits in the United States were more interested in
debating the fate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or whether the suggestion of withdrawal was an act of cowardice.