torture – C.S.News

A Yazidi family’s journey from war-torn Iraq to America

By C.S. Hagen
MOORHEAD – Today, Ezzat Khudhur Alhaidar is safe from ISIS guns, but the memories of war still haunt him. In 2005, he donned a U.S. Army uniform and began working as a front-line interpreter, a position that put food in his belly and a target on his back.

He leans back into a leather sofa while his wife, Zaman Alo, finishes setting a makeshift table with a mound of biryani, steaming hot chickpea soup. Onions covered with sumac follow. Four more dishes take up the table’s last inches, which doubles as a nightstand: homemade pickled green tomatoes, olives, a sumac salad, and chicken kabob pieces, tastes of Alhaidar’s homeland in Iraq. He bemoans the lack of proper Iraqi kabobs, also known as kafta; the taste here is just not the same.

Volume blaring, Alhaidar’s five children finish watching “The Emoji Movie.” After only three years in America, his eldest children speak English with ease, explaining the movie’s plot. His second youngest daughter performs cartwheels with the grace of an Olympic athlete on the living room floor. The apartment walls are sparse; few pictures or decorations accompanied the family on their flight from Iraq, but the apartment is home and it’s safe.

They’re Yazidi, an ethno-religious minority, persecuted for centuries because of their adherence to Yazidism, the oldest Mesopotamian religion. Alhaidar obtained U.S. visas three months before the most recent pogrom against Yazidis began, watching news reports helplessly of neighbors and family fleeing before ISIS’s onslaught.

Ezzat Alhaidar – photo by C.S. Hagen

When Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003 during Operation Red Dawn, Alhaidar remembers feeling relief. During Hussein’s reign, no one dared breathe the dictator’s name, let alone speak ill of the government. If suspected of dissatisfaction, one could face flesh-eating acid in one of multiple torture chambers, Alhaidar said. Few came out alive.

As a child when he saw police, he remembers shivering with fear. “It was not life,” Alhaidar said. “We were the happiest people when we got rid of Saddam, but we didn’t know after Saddam, a thousand Saddams would come to the country. If there was a choice between now and Saddam, we would not choose Saddam.”

The ISIS invasion of Yazidi areas came quickly in 2014, with no time to raise alarms. The Peshmerga, the Iraqi Kurdistan forces, promised safety but fled before oncoming ISIS troops. One night, Yazidi villages went to sleep and awoke the next morning with ISIS in charge.

And then from 6,000 miles away, Alhaidar watched as the slaughter began.

The Yazidi people are regarded as people of a different faith who need to be killed or converted to Islam. Once before, they were targeted by Muslim extremists, primarily Sunni jihadists, after the US invasion of Iraq in 2014.

ISIS jihadists have been mostly beaten back, but Alhaidar’s relatives still have no home. After the massacres began, Alhaidar managed visas for his mother, a few nephews and nieces, from America, but other family still remain behind. They live in refugee camps and are unable to return home.

More than 40,000 Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar, identified as the final resting place of Noah’s ark, and nearly half a million people poured into Dohuk, the Kurdish north, in one of the largest and most rapid refugee movements in decades.

Villages were decimated. More than 5,000 people were killed in two days. Another 7,600 women were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery, many still missing. No less than 3,000 children were sent to brainwashing, indoctrination schools to learn how to become future terrorists, Alhaidar said.

Most of the ISIS forces were recognizable faces, Alhaidar said, coming from neighboring towns, and not foreign fighters.

“What can we expect of these kids in the future?” Alhaidar said. “We were crying over here. ISIS attacked my people. People have become hopeless, homeless.”

Growing up hard
At 16, Alhaidar rose with the sun to haul bricks on his back. Not manageable red baked bricks but heavy construction bricks, with a daily quota of 100, for $25 in pay.

“Life is hard, sometimes, and harsh, it can crush you,” Alhaidar said. “But I got a lesson from the bricks: if I didn’t go to school I knew I would spend my life hauling those bricks.”

In ancient times, Yazidi culture and religious rituals were passed orally from generation to generation. They do not have their own schools, and mosques were avoided to deter conversion.

Historically, the Yazidi have been attacked repeatedly by neighbors. Atrocities were recorded by researchers, historians, and writers, such as Henry Austen Layard. One genocide occurred in Shekhan Province, close to Mosul, after fleeing Yazidi were trapped along the Tigris River due to spring flooding. Yazidi women jumped into the river to escape conversion, according to Laynard.

A second genocide occurred in Sinjar Province, when Ottoman soldiers beheaded Yazidis.

Picture of Yazidis before terrorist firing squads – from Ezzat Alhaidar’s Facebook

The Alhaidar family is originally from Sinjar, but his parents fled from oppression to a village called Kabartu, where Alhaidar was born. Later, Hussein’s regime destroyed their village and grouped 12 villages into a collective called Omayya. After Saddam fell from power, the collective was renamed Khanke.

Although the villagers were also Yazidi, Alhaidar’s family was never accepted into the community, he said. Alhaidar’s father, formerly a shepherd, became a day laborer to put food on the table, and life for his family was difficult.

“They were always higher, as we were not from that village,” Alhaidar said.

Life became harder after his father died in 2004. Without money to take him to the hospital, his father asked a friend for help, but he passed away the next day.

“After my father’s death, my life became harder, and I felt that I had to walk alone with no support,” Alhaidar said. “My brothers and sister and my mother were in the situation, and were doing their best, yet nothing could be compared to my father. Before my father’s death, we would barely think about the tough or hard side of life.”

Refugee camps currently in use in Duhok area, Iraq – photo provided by BRHA Duhok

In 2013, the government handed out land parcels to the villagers, but not to his family. “They were mean, and they were always the people of the situation, nobody could raise their face to say ‘Hey, we’re over here.’”

“We were always getting attacked by those around us, and by that I mean Muslims,” Alhaidar said. “The only reason we were oppressed was because of our religion, which makes it difficult to maintain our culture.”

He began studying late into every night at the Iraq University of Dohuk. College was free, but he still needed money for food, clothes, and lodging. Some days, he borrowed clothes to attend classes. A brother helped with a loan of 500 dinars, the equivalent of $300.

While his friends were getting married and buying cars, Alhaidar worried about enough cash for his next meal. A dowry for marriage seemed an impossible dream. He spoke his native Kurdish, also Arabic and English, and saw opportunity when U.S. armed forces came, once again, to his homeland in 2003.

He signed up as an interpreter.

“That decision changed my life,” Alhaidar said. “And it changed the lives of all the people around me. Because of that decision to join the U.S. Army, I brought 28 people to the US and they are working, smiling, while if they were left over there, whatever you say is not enough, at the very least they would have no jobs.”

As a U.S. Army interpreter
“If you were a minority, you were gone. If you were US Army and coming from vacation, you were gone,” Alhaidar said about a lonely road he frequently had to travel. “Gone” means a quick bullet or indefinite imprisonment for exchange. Al-Qaeda terrorists would not frequently target military Humvees, but rather the vehicles following behind.

“I was an easy target for them,” Alhaidar said.

Being Yazidi and an interpreter for an invading force, and frequently meeting face to face with terrorists during interrogation sessions, meant he had to take extra precautions. Frequently, suspected terrorists were interviewed, then released two weeks later.

“We were safe, but we were scared to go anywhere,” Alhaidar said. He always watched for tailing cars, never went to Mosul. Terrorists targeted interpreters and their families. Stories of fellow interpreters ambushed by terrorists kept him on edge. Such as the story of one man who broke 27 bones during an Al-Qaeda sneak attack.

Before joining the US Army, food was scarce. Afterward, he could eat his fill. “You could smell the food a mile from the restaurant,” Alhaidar said.

He went on duty for 45 days in a row, then came home for six. He also worked as an advisor for US troops, helping differentiate between friend and suicide bomber. When he saw indiscriminate shooting, it was one of his jobs to stop the soldiers or private mercenaries and tell them the differences between Orange Zones and Red Zones, the latter meaning dangerous areas.

Ezzat Alhaidar while an interpreter for US Army – Facebook page photo

The stress of war, constant vigilance, leaving his home country to start a new life in a strange land, has taken its toll, Alhaidar said. He opens a kitchen cupboard and returns with a brown paper bag, filled with prescription medicine for PTSD. He’s improved over the years he’s lived in Moorhead, but is filled with a longing to help his people, as well as the new American community in Fargo/Moorhead.

He’s tried for help at the local Veterans Hospital, but was denied. The U.S. Army does not consider him a veteran.

“We wore the same uniform, wore the same boots, went on the same missions, and could be killed at any moment in Iraq and Afghanistan, but unfortunately, today, they do not recognize us as veterans,” Alhaidar said.

Ezzat Alhaidar showing his PTSD medicines – photo by C.S. Hagen

“It’s not about money. The U.S. Army was a school, and I was proud to be a student in that school. I was a part of it. But they said ‘No, rules are rules.’ Even if they could consider us veterans, and not pay us anything, that would be fine.

“Are you a veteran?” Alhaidar pretended to be military doctor questioning himself.

“No. I don’t have a paper. So what do they call it when I was working with them? Part of our duties meant that if we weren’t there, many more US soldiers would have been killed.”

Additional duties included interpreting any communication between Iraqi and US forces, talking with village leaders, learning where the dangerous spots were, and locating IEDs.

Alhaidar was injured once when his Humvee was ordered to lead a nocturnal drive without headlights and they smashed into a gravel pile. He marched with soldiers into war, accompanied searches for terrorists going house to house, relayed information quickly under fire.

“We were between them,” Alhaidar said. “We would know who was lying and who was a danger.”

Once, a commanding officer known to Alhaidar as Captain Kingman, ordered him from the safety of a Humvee to accompany an ambulance into Mosul Province.

“Even a crazy person wouldn’t go into Mosul in an ambulance,” Alhaidar said. “No armor, no protection.”

He survived, but the same captain also required him to translate while he cursed elderly village leaders. “And you know, in Iraqi community, that was not allowed,” Alhaidar said. “We were there to protect people.”

The U.S. Army had one rule he can’t forget: never chase terrorists if they ran away.

“These bitter moments gave me lessons in life,” Alhaidar said. “I’m a new American, but even in Iraq I was American in my soul.”

Because of his role helping the U.S. Army, officials said he would be protected, but Alhaidar waited more than a year before obtaining a visa, during which time he saved enough money to purchase a house and find a wife, with a $7,000 dowry.

After he left the military in 2012, he worked as a teacher with Weatherford, an oil company. Working 15 days on and 15 off, he also started a computer shop and a learning center for teaching English as a second language.

The Alhaidar family – photo by C.S. Hagen

America
Over sips of cloying Iraqi tea, Alhaidar knows he is one of the more fortunate interpreters, one of thousands who worked with the U.S. Army during its post-9/11 military operations. In exchange for their services, Iraqis who collaborated were promised special visas, but the Special Immigrant Visa program became backlogged. Some are considered traitors by insurgents, and are actively hunted. Identities were kept secret.

President Donald Trump’s Administration travel ban has recently created new obstacles for the Army’s former Iraqi partners, and many are being denied visas.

In May 2014, however, Alhaidar packed his family’s lives into eight suitcases. He filled four with his most precious possessions – books – some Kurdish, some Arabic, and others in English. Hard drives and photo albums, the only transportable keepsakes he could bring, went into another suitcase.

Traveling through Jordan, his family landed in Chicago after a 14-hour flight.

“Everything was green, everything was beautiful, but we still knew our trip was not done,” Alhaidar said. A type of sadness came over his family during their layover in Jordan. Their home for countless generations seemed far away.

Today, Alhaidar has three bachelor’s degrees, and is active in community development. Neither Republican nor Democrat, he believes in dealing with issues, and not following a political line. He’s building a nonprofit organization, and is active with Mindful Seeds, a leadership program in the Fargo/Moorhead area.

Settling into America hasn’t been easy, but slowly, his children are growing used to the area. Alhaidar’s wife is in school, and he has found work, but is looking for more meaningful employment, perhaps one day in politics.

“Life has started to smile on us.”

With recent hate crime incidents in Fargo, seven cases so far in 2017, Alhaidar challenges people to make attempts to understand world events. He is no stranger to hate crimes. In Iraq, he was part of a close circle of friends including engineers, doctors, veterinarians, and technicians, with himself as a teacher, who once, when life was simpler, enjoyed picnics, a few beers, and music together.

“Due to tensions, discrimination, sectarian religious and political issues, and adding to that, ISIS attacks, there is barely anyone left in this group anymore. They all left the country. Each went to a different country, whether in Europe, America, or Australia, to start a new life away from their childhood memories.

“Life is about stepping toward each other and building trust,” Alhaidar said. “Even white supremacists we should listen to. We have to be careful of our daily actions, and see Fargo/Moorhead as a colorful community. Today, the life of Moorhead is the life of our kids.”

Grave behind Purple Bamboo Grove Church outside of the old English Concession. Watchmen of the church say it belongs to a young boy, anonymous.

Photos by C.S. Hagen – Grave behind Purple Bamboo Grove Church outside of the old English Concession. Watchmen of the church say it belongs to a young boy, anonymous.

By C.S. Hagen

TIANJIN, CHINA (PRC) – Behind the crippled Purple Bamboo Grove Church rests a poorly made grave. Tiered red brick forms a horseshoe shape, yawning in the middle to reveal blackness beneath. Ground surrounding the grave is moist and springy, a perfect breeding ground for the poison ivy that surrounds the site in warmer months like so many sentient soldiers.

Three carefully placed ceramic toys adorn the grave’s left side. The most undamaged toy is of a Christmas tree with four smiling Santas holding hands.

“It is the grave of a child,” the night watchman said. Fearing to lose his metal rice

The ceramic toy Santa at the grave

bowl of a job, he preferred to keep his name private. “An elderly foreign lady once visited this spot.”

The watchman didn’t know who placed the ceramic toys on top of the grave, but admitted the old church was haunted. The boy’s grave was not the only body buried in the back of the Purple Bamboo Grove Church, but no other headstone or marker remain. In June 2012 a man quit working as a second watchman because he believed the ruined church became alive with the dead at night.

The night watchman who remained knew of the atrocities that were once committed at the church’s front doors and agreed that if any place in Tianjin (formerly spelled Tientsin), should be haunted, the old church stood high on the list.

Cement mixing buckets, bricks, pipes and tarps lay forgotten at the entrance. Trees are warped and mostly leafless in mid August. The old Red Cross sign that once advertised the Sisters of Charity Orphanage in the midst of Purple Bamboo Grove, the heart of the red light district and a stone’s throw from the old English Concession, has been chiseled away. Remnants of communist propaganda painted in revolutionary red still remain.

‘Mao Zedong Thought,’ the slogan says.

Entryway to the Sisters of Charity Orphanage, the Cultural Revolution slogan is painted on left side pillars

Ironically the entrance’s doors remain, but the archway is blackened by fire, reminiscent of the brutal atrocities committed in 1870.

“The sisters were stripped naked, and, one after the other, in full sight of the remainder, their bodies were ripped open, their eyes gouged out and their breasts cut off. As each one was mutilated the body was hoisted on long spears and thrown into the burning chapel.” O.D. Rasmussen wrote in his book Tientsin: An Illustrated Outline History (Tientsin Press, 1925).

Missionary reports dating back to 1871 report nine nuns from the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage were burned beyond recognition.

“…And of these most have been mere unrecognizable fragments; how as a fit accompaniment to the rest, thirty or forty of the children of the hospital were smothered in the vaults where they had taken refuge,” reported Charles William Wason in the Shanghai Evening Courier in September 1870.

Inside the Purple Bamboo Grove Church

The original church was destroyed, but was rebuilt. Pillars the sisters were tortured upon are not the same ones dating back to the Tientsin Massacre in 1870. The ground, however, hallowed or desecrated, is the same. The sisters bodies were buried across the street from the Astor Hotel outside the British Consulate, Gordon Hall, demolished in 1984 after the Tangshan Earthquake. A memorial was erected over their charred remains.

Purple Bamboo Grove altar

Events that led Tientsin’s populace to bloody deeds in 1870 and again in 1900 are not without merit, if one was to look through the eyes of the locals at that time. In a world spiraling toward locomotives, electricity and division of labor, the average Chinese person in 1870 was still mired in superstition and ancient tradition. Rumors began to spread in Tientsin of the paper man, a demon who rose from the Hai River, (then called the Peiho), to kidnap, injure and kill the natives.

The paper man, of course, had pale skin, colored hair and green eyes.

“…He transforms himself, by the aid of some mysterious power, into paper. At times, it is asserted, he will appear as a scrap of plain paper; at other times he comes in the guise of an old newspaper. A favorite dodge with him is to get himself made into a kite. He thereby accomplishes his object of getting into people’s houses with greater facility…” wrote George Thin in his book The Tientsin Massacre, published in 1870.

According to George Thin the most common remedy was for families to sprinkle bathing water on every scrap of paper in the house, which would “certainly give the paper man his quietus.”

The paper man also took the form of women, and in Tientsin more specifically the Sisters of Charity, who in their black robes and horned white hats struck horror into the local populace. Such an image to the Chinese sparked fear, for white is the color of death, and rumors the sisters were kidnapping children to make powerful magic spells and medicines quickly became panic.

In truth, the Sisters of Charity provided shelter, food and medicines for orphans, but due to Christian doctrines and the symbolization of communion the populace believed the nuns, as well as all Christian congregations, were cannibals, and were secretly slaying the city’s children to make Eye and Heart Bewitching Philtres.

Citywide panic turned to rage when graves were exhumed behind the Wanghai Lou, or Victory Mary Church. Inside the graves were bodies of children, who according to missionary journals of the time died from plague. Rage then became a riot when yamen officials caught three Chinese men who confessed they sold ten children to the Sisters of Mercy. The rumors raged like a conflagration to every Tientsin district, coming to a head on June 21, 1870. Missionaries were boiling babies to sell to opium merchants, the people cried. Pettifoggers, or yamen clerks, ran through the streets and rain dancers with green wreaths, swinging peach wood swords, stirred the local populace to rise up against the foreigners.

Before the sun set more than twenty-two politicians, priests, nuns and merchants were killed.

Daoists believe each person has three spirits: the hun, or cloud spirit, which exits the body on death, the p’o, or the white spirit, which stays behind, and then a third part that enters a spirit tablet and demands reverence from surviving family. Another essential part of the Daoist beliefs demand that a body must return home in order for its souls to be at rest.

If any credence is given to such beliefs, then surely, the Purple Bamboo Grove Church must be one of the world’s most haunted sites. A trip within the decrepit structure is harrowing. The original altar still sits where the church’s last sermon was given. An unreadable bronze plaque in the wall commemorates the deaths of unknown members. Stray sections of stained glass in back room windows defy the stench and decay and a humid breeze, sifting through the buildings cracks, whines as loud as screams.