Come Home, Moose
KIRKUK, Iraq – America, look into the face of this man. Look now, because he could be dead tomorrow, and you and I will be complicit in his murder.
The International Organization for Migration knows him as IZ-120593.
Our Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services lists him in the A File as 212422627.
If you live in an ever-shrinking enclave of Sunni Arabs in increasingly Kurdish Kirkuk you call him Mustafa Fahmi. And if you’re the Al Qaeda in Iraq insurgents who burned down his home, you call him a traitor because he helped us .
Our soldiers know him as “Moose.” He began working for the 1st Infantry Division’s Second Brigade shortly after July 4, 2004. He kept translating for our officers and NCOs of of A Co., 5–73 CAV throughout the brutal fighting in Zaganiya. His wife left him because he refused to quit helping the occupiers.
Like millions of other Iraqis, his family has been in a constant state of movement since a civil war in the wake of our invasion engulfed their nation. They lost their property in Diyala. They fled to Jordan and briefly to Syria. Then they returned to Iraq and now live in Kirkuk, protected temporarily by the Kurds in an uneasy truce that could end as the republic we invaded in 2003 returns to sectarian conflict.
On Aug. 14, 2010, Fahmi applied for an American visa as a refugee through the nonprofit International Organization for Migration. On April 21, 2011, he received a letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that said his application had been deferred because “(f)urther review of your eligibility for refugee resettlement in the United States is necessary.”
IOM told him yesterday that his application is still pending at Immigration Services.
He has a sponsor waiting for him in the U.S. The 5–73’s Maj. Michael Few, a friend of this blog, has agreed to take him in, although whenever he calls the Department of State and Citizenship and Immigration Services the agencies won’t tell him anything.
Moose and I spent early December sojourning across an Iraq lurching toward social implosion. The vast majority of Iraqis don’t want another civil war that murdered tens of thousands of citizens, broke the back of the Sunni Arab insurgency and displaced millions of refugees. But ongoing tensions between sectarian groups and an increasingly hated government backed by the U.S. have led to escalating terrorist attacks across northern Iraq and the capital, and Moose is particularly vulnerable.
“If the Kurds tell the internally displaced people to leave this province and go back to their original homes, if that happened it will be bad for my family and that concerns me more than my personal safety,” said Moose, adding that he would have to try to flee to Jordan to seek shelter in a camp run by the United Nations.
Assuming he’s not killed first, of course, by any of the various militias who want him gone.
To find out why the delay on resettling Moose has reached 1 ½ years, I called the State Department. Consular officials initially marked Fahmi as a refugee who deserved to come to the U.S. because of his highly vulnerable status in the new Iraq. The Department of Homeland Security initially agreed, too.
When asked about the delays, State pointed to Citizenship and Immigration Services and its enhanced security measures enacted in recent years and then refused to say anything else except that they won’t issue Moose a visa until Homeland Security finishes its security check.
A Homeland Security review that’s supposed to take a few weeks has lasted 10 months.
Citing privacy concerns, Citizenship and Immigration couldn’t speak directly about Moose’s case, but they said that they must balance the need to help as many political refugees as possible escape to the U.S. with safeguarding Americans from potential terrorists.
“We’re working constantly to make this process as efficient as possible, while also making sure on behalf of our national security that we’re admitting the right people into the U.S.,” said Citizenship and Immigration spokesman Daniel Cosgrove.
Cosgrove’s agency has resettled about 62,000 refugees since 2007 – with California and Michigan being the most popular destinations — but the Barack Obama administration that pulled our troops out of Iraq also slowed to a trickle the Iraqi refugees getting into the U.S., stranding thousands of our former friends in a country that has no use for them.
Blame that on the 2010 arrests in Kentucky of two resettled refugees tied to roadside bombs in Iraq.
Unlike Moose, neither of those men had risked their lives working for our military in Iraq, but translators like Moose have suffered because of their terrorism. Few and Moose also believe that their case has been dogged by another interpreter, a former Mahdi Army supporter, who denounced Moose as a possible spy for the Sunni insurgency – allegations that were unproven and finally discredited by the Shiite judge who let him go.
“I was arrested on March 2, 2007 and I left jail on Oct. 9, 2007,” said Moose. “I was 100 percent innocent. I did not know about the other terp who made allegations about me, but I have been told that he was a Shiite and I am Sunni, and most of the translators who were with me also got fired because they were Sunni.”
The man who denounced him left the program. Few has been trying to get federal officials to understand that these sorts of messy moments were common in an Iraq divided along ethnic lines and shouldn’t affect Moose’s case.
Critics have long said that Few and Moose won’t find a receptive ear in Washington. Because bureaucrats gain nothing by letting him into the country, they’ll freeze him out forever.
Cosgrove, however, proposed a solution. Like many of our former workers, Moose applied for a visa through a resettlement program that applies to any Iraqi, regardless of whether they faithfully and courageously served us or not. But Congress has ordered the Department of State’s Refugee Admissions Program to manage two special immigrant visa (or “SIV”) programs that help qualified Iraqis like Moose immigrate here. At my urging, he’s now reapplied under the SIV program and Few can’t wait to explain to the agency why the charges against his terp were bogus.
If they call.
Moose hopes that they do. SIV applications are approved not only at a faster clip but far more get greenlighted – about 92 percent of all submissions — than those in the general program, according to the latest Homeland Security data.
Unlike other Iraqis yearning to be free – and safe – in the U.S., Moose comes with skills that are needed here. He’s a trained engineer, speaks perfect English and will be living with a retired American officer in the high-tech research triangle of North Carolina.
Moose lost nearly everything to help us – his wife, his home and almost his freedom. All he wants is a chance to start over in the country which he faithfully served, an America that has abandoned him once already.
If he’s killed tonight by an Iraq that would just as soon be rid of its Moose Fahmis, it would be very easy for me to blame a faceless bureaucrat in a distant Beltway office. But I would just as soon blame myself and everyone else who knows that this man needs our help and can’t get it.
We’re not always a just or a fair nation, but this democracy at our best always aspires to be both, which is why we rightly love it.
America, please do the only decent thing we now can do for this man. Bring Moose home to us.
And then bring home the rest we deserted, too.
Tags: Department of Homeland Security, Iraqi interpreters, refugees
