From Iraq To Syria To The East End
Targeted by Al Qaeda, he was forced to flee
 Marie Maciak
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(8/14/2008) On Sept. 10, 2006, more than three years after the United States invaded Iraq, Firas R. Taresh received a death threat from Al Qaeda demanding that he quit his job at the American engineering company Bechtel, where he worked as a civil and environmental engineer. The note also ordered him to raise a white flag over his house in Baghdad.
Mr. Taresh acted quickly, raising the flag and leaving his home to live with his uncle in Ur Sector north of Baghdad so that he could go safely to Bechtel’s offices to formally terminate his contract, deliver his employee badge, and collect his last paycheck. He was scheduled to be released from Bechtel two days after receiving the threat.
“But somehow Al Qaeda knew that I was still going to my job,” Mr. Taresh, 32, wrote in an Internet chat on Tuesday from Damascus, Syria. “And for this reason, they killed my brother instead of me, by mistake, when he was driving my car.”
Mr. Taresh’s brother, Muhaned, was killed on Sept. 15. He was 30 years old and had a 4-year-old son. “I miss his sharp tongue, I miss his face, I miss his son . . . everything,” he wrote.
He spent the next several weeks mourning at his uncle’s home until it was safe for him to return to Baghdad to work full time as a teacher’s assistant at Al-Mustansiriya University, where he had been working since April of that year.
Mr. Taresh, a Sunni, carried an Iraqi I.D. card with a different name, one that derived from a Shiite family, so that he could move around safely in the Shiite neighborhood where his uncle lived. He worked at Al-Mustansiriya until December 2006. On Nov. 20, while he was at the university, Al Qaeda came looking for him at his uncle’s house.
“They broke down my uncle’s home,” he wrote. “Thank God that I was at the college.” His uncle was injured, and his furniture was destroyed.
Mr. Taresh then moved in with a friend in Karada, a section of central Baghdad, and upon his family’s urging, obtained a fake passport and booked a trip to Syria. He left Iraq on December 10, before he could say goodbye to his family.
“And there is a big difference between the leaving and escaping,” he wrote, “because I was escaping for my life, and can you imagine that you have to escape without even saying bye to your mom or brothers?”
Mr. Taresh has been living in Damascus ever since. But escaping Iraq did not put his family out of danger. On April 22, 2007, Mr. Taresh learned that his father had been kidnapped while driving his car. His body was found at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad.
“They [his family] did not tell me [right away] that my father was killed because they thought that if they told me, I would go back to Iraq to attend his funeral,” Mr. Taresh wrote. When he found out, “I decided to leave Syria with my fake passport and return back with my real one.”
There are close to 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in Syria today, according to the American Friends Service Committee, with 2.7 million Iraqis internally displaced, meaning they have been forced from their homes but are still living in Iraq. There are 500,000 refugees in Jordan, 57,000 in Iran, 50,000 in Lebanon, and 70,000 in Egypt.
In 2008, the United States offered to resettle 12,000 Iraqi refugees by September, but it has only admitted 8,815, according to Human Rights First. In fiscal year 2007, it admitted just over 1,600. Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and Denmark have more Iraqi refugees living in their countries than the U.S.
Marie Maciak, a documentary filmmaker, editor, and the co-founder of the media studies program at the Ross School in East Hampton, met Mr. Taresh last September while making a documentary on the refugee crisis in Syria. Initially a subject in the story she was filming, Mr. Taresh quickly became involved in the project, working as her translator and field producer.
“As soon as people learned I was in the neighborhood, they wanted to tell their stories,” said Ms. Maciak, who lives in North Haven with her daughter, Cosma. “They didn’t even care if the camera was set up yet, they just wanted to speak about what happened.”
Because Syria is a police state, journalism and documentary work are not permitted without government approval, Ms. Maciak said, and as a result, Mr. Taresh risked his life working with her. Another character in the documentary, “Departed From Damascus,” has been imprisoned in Syria for over a month due to her humanitarian activities with journalists. A shortened version of the film premiered in March at Tribeca Cinemas in New York City as part of the New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival.
Many Iraqis are living in poverty in Damascus, where a large number of refugees have crowded the streets and schools, Ms. Maciak said. “Their presence is increasing the cost of rent and basic foods and putting a strain on the use of electricity. There are few schools that are not overcrowded — Syrians don’t have enough teachers or space.”
Because Iraqis are not legally permitted to work in Syria, they work under the table for a tenth of the amount Syrians would be paid, Ms. Maciak said, that is if they are lucky enough to find work. For a while, around 40,000 Iraqis were coming into Syria every month. But the strain those numbers had on the small economy caused Syria to close its border to Iraqi refugees in February 2007.
Since he arrived in Damascus, Mr. Taresh has been trying to get approved for resettlement. The first appointment he could get when he went to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.N. Refugee agency, last July, was in September 2007. His mother and his 23-year-old brother, Ali, left Iraq for Syria last August. Not until July 16 of this year was Mr. Taresh and his family officially accepted for resettlement to the United States.
They are expected to arrive on the East End next Thursday. Ms. Maciak has offered them a place in her house until they make more permanent arrangements. “I’ve alerted the community and there are a lot of people that want to help,” Ms. Maciak said.
“One Ross School parent donated an old car, another found a gardening job for Firas’s mother. Firas can teach Arabic at the Ross School — just some little start-up things so that they will have a sense of dignity. They are very proud and want to get on their own feet as soon as possible. At the same time, they want to be part of the community.”
Mr. Taresh has a master’s degree in environmental engineering and hopes to pursue a Ph.D. when he comes to America. On Tuesday, he had a cultural orientation held by the International Organization for Migration in Syria. He was discouraged by what he learned. “I’m not worried about the studying,” he wrote. “I have very good grades and I’m never scared of the studying itself. I’m worried about the acceptance of my degree . . . in the States.”
He is hoping that a professor he knows at Penn State University will be able to help him out, but “I need a lot of luck to get a scholarship.”
“The only thing that makes me relieved is the presence of Marie by my side,” he added. “She is a very wonderful woman and I feel that she is making a huge effort to help me and my family. I don’t know how I shall return these generous efforts.”
Iraqi refugees are given $450 each to cover one month’s rent, Ms. Maciak said. She was surprised to learn that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops helps handle refugee aid. “They match in other forms of assistance such as providing food stamps for three to four months and refugee medical assistance.”
Because of the high cost of housing in New York, there is a moratorium in this area on “free cases,” or refugees who have no “anchor.” As a result, most refugees who have no family or friends in the U.S. are not approved for resettlement, and some are sent to other parts of the country where the cost of living is much cheaper, according to Ms. Maciak.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is contracted by the government to handle the resettlement process after security checks and final approval by Homeland Security and the International Organization for Migration is provided, Ms. Maciak said. Catholic Charities, a local partner of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Amityville, handles Long Island refugee resettlement cases.
“That was a surprise,” Ms. Maciak said, “because it is a huge and complex responsibility to address the needs of a traumatized refugee from a different culture in terms of social integration, reconciliation, and mental health,” she said. “The Amityville office, for example, is helpful and caring but they do not have Muslims or Arabic-speaking staff, nor do they have the capacity to address the main block that will inhibit a refugee from being a part of society — trauma.”
“It’s going to be a really interesting experience for them and for our community in terms of acceptance and learning about different cultures,” she said. “We’re at war with Iraq, but how many Iraqis do you know? It’s so far away, this war.”
Mr. Taresh hopes that the lessons from this war, in terms of the media’s failure to provide Americans a window into his community before the invasion, “will be studied in the future to avoid the humiliation of other nations.” Before the invasion, “we had a country, security, jobs, a future, family, and we did not do any wrong to be invaded,” he wrote.