Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/06/2003 4:12:53 PM PDT by MadIvan
BY THIS time next week, Ibrahim al-Zayad hopes to be walking through the streets of his home town in southern Iraq dressed in American combat fatigues with an M16 assault rifle at his shoulder, ready to fight.
“If I don’t help the Americans to kill Saddam, then who will? Iraq is my country. I must fight for it,” he said after Friday prayers at a community centre in the shabby suburbs of Detroit.
But although he expects to fight alongside American soldiers and to be equipped for battle by a US Army quartermaster, Mr al-Zayad will belong to a different force altogether.
The quietly-spoken 44-year-old from Smawa is one of a growing band of exiled Iraqis in America, mainly Shia and from the south of the country, who have sought permission from the Pentagon to fight alongside the so-called “coalition of the willing” in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
About 250 men have asked to go, but their ranks could soon swell to the thousands, according to Mr al-Zayad and his friends. Their ramshackle brigade does not have a name, but Mr al-Zayad said that the First Dearborn Iraqi Freedom Fighters had a certain ring to it.
So far, though, the Pentagon has only called on about 40 of these men to be sent for training and assessment before being shipped out to Iraq. “But soon they will need us,” Mr al-Zayad said. “They want us to help. We can find Saddam and his men. We know who they are, we know where they are.”
These Iraqi Muslims in Dearborn want to finish the job that they started during the uprisings of 1991 and kill President Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party cohorts before reclaiming the houses and land that they were forced to flee after the last Gulf War.
“Last time we had victory in 14 out of 18 Iraqi states, then America went away,” Mr al- Zayad said. “We had to run to Saudi Arabia and many of our families and friends were killed. Then we came to the US as refugees. This time we hope we will win and kill Saddam and Baathi people. Especially Baathi people.”
They claim that they will be able to help to build trust between coalition troops and the Iraqi population and to weed out supporters of Saddam.
“Let the freedom fighters do their job,” said Imam Husham al-Husainy, who runs the Karbala Centre, where Mr al-Zayad and many other Shia Iraqis gather for Friday prayers. “We do not want American soldiers and British soldiers to die in Iraq. We do not want them to come home in plastic bags. Let us help them.”
More importantly, the Iraqi refugees in Dearborn want to make sure that they have a part to play in Iraq’s independent future, which they are confident will be delivered soon.
Dearborn is a dismal place to live today, with freezing rain blowing down from Canada over decaying rows of dilapidated low-rise houses, shops and factories. To Mr al-Zayad and his friends, the prosperity and beauty of southern Iraq before Saddam came to power, and before the war with Iran, is a distant memory.
The Detroit suburb is best-known in America as the headquarters of Ford Motors and for being the heart of the so called “Rust Belt”. But it is also home to about 20,000 Shia Muslims from southern Iraq. Many gather every day at the Karbala Centre, a small community centre named after one of the holiest sites in Iraq.
But Shia men are not the only Iraqis in Detroit. A large community of Chaldeans — Iraqi Roman Catholics — live down the freeway in another poor suburb around Seven Mile Road.
The two factions are far from united. The deep and bitter divisions between the communities prove that putting Iraq back together after the war will be difficult and delicate in the extreme.
The Shia claim that the Chaldeans are all supporters of Saddam, and, indeed, some of them are. There are radio and television stations, newspapers and magazines, all produced in Detroit, that have shown vociferous support for Saddam.
Some of the Chaldeans claim that the Shia refugees invent stories about the oppression and torture in Iraq in the hope that they will be better positioned to profit when the country is rebuilt.
“Did you see these people get tortured? Do you know how they got these scars? Did you see Saddam and his men kill millions like they say? All these stories they tell you are lies,” said Peter Hanna, president of the Chaldean Association, which is next door to the Church of the Sacred Heart off Seven Mile Road.
He agreed, after a lengthy discussion, that Saddam Hussein must go and that he is a “bad man”, but, at even greater length, he told how the Chaldeans were the most- trusted people in Saddam’s entourage, after his own Sunni Muslims.
“Saddam knows that we Christians are faithful and honest people. We do not betray people. We are his cooks and his maids and his staff in Iraq,” Mr Hanna said. “I left Iraq, like many Chaldean people, because the regime was not fair.
“Iraq is one of the richest countries in the world, but only a very few have the money and the power. That is why I left. For this reason he does not deserve to be running Iraq.”
Pastor Jacob Yasso, the priest of Sacred Heart, is quick to denounce Saddam. “There are different views here,” he said, “but you can judge a man by his actions. Judge Saddam by his deeds.”
Support for Saddam has diminished among the Iraqi Christians of late, but a photograph album in Pastor Yasso’s desk shows how closely the church, and the priest, were once linked to the Iraqi President.
The pictures show a youthful Pastor Yasso in 1980 presenting Saddam with a key to the city of Detroit, in exchange for a cash gift of $1.45 million (about £1million). He gave $200,000 to pay Sacred Heart’s debts, $1 million to build a nursery and day care centre and another $250,000 to help to rebuild the church. In all Saddam paid for 11 Chaldean churches to be built in America, from California to Michigan. He is still an honorary citizen of Detroit, and the locks have not been changed.
But Pastor Yasso is worried that, when Iraq is rebuilt, the minority of Christians will be forgotten. “Also I worry that there will be a great conflict in the world between Muslims and Christians,” he said.
Imam al-Husainy closed an impassioned sermon on Friday with a caution: “This is a golden opportunity for the East and the West. For Christians and for Muslims. We need to clean our image, clean our slates and rebuild the bridges between us all. Together in Iraq. We must not waste this opportunity for it may not come again.”
Regards, Ivan
Sad but true. We did leave them high and dry. I hope they get saddam and his gang and punish them as they see fit.
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