What’s In A Name?
| by Alex Poppe |
The passport depends on the checkpoint. At Kurdish checkpoints, he uses the passport with the first name “Omar.” If it’s an Iraqi checkpoint, he uses the one calling him “Ali.” It’s practically a death wish to have a Sunni name like “Omar” or “Othman” or “Bakar” in his home town of Basra, Iraq, a Shia dominated city where Sunnis are targets of sectarian violence.
I met 21-year-old Omar Alkhalidy at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani where he studies English as a second language. He was my student for one term. I’m in the midst of my second stint teaching English in northern Iraq and my fifth in the Middle East. The Kurdish and Iraqi students draw me back. No matter what horrors they have experienced, their humor, compassion and generosity triumph. Alkhalidy is no exception.
Alkhalidy has fled for his life three times.
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Before the war, Basra was a diverse and culturally vibrant city. No one talked about sectarian divides. Women went to school, and they weren’t forced to wear hijabs or burqas in public.
“You could do anything,” Alkhalidy said.
But Basra was the first city to fall to the coalition forces in the Iraq War. In the 2003 invasion, British and U.S. forces entered Iraq from Kuwait, caravanning to Basra on the “Highway of Death.” The U.S. predicted that the Shiite population of Basra would welcome the coalition forces and rise up against Saddam, but they were met with unexpected resistance. After a few days of conflict, U.S. forces moved north to continue the invasion. They left the British to siege Basra, which was in the midst of intense sectarian violence enflamed by the invasion.
Alkhalidy’s family was not exempt from the violence. As eight-year-old, he watched his father and uncles fire their shotguns out of windows at Shia militia members during a skirmish. Hearing gunfire, British soldiers on a tank patrol approached Alkhalidy’s street. The soldiers told everyone to drop their weapons, or they would shoot. They seized the weapons and put them in a car, which they then ran over with the tank. They took the Shia militia into custody, but Alkhalidy’s father and uncles were spared from arrest when his father explained that he was a doctor in the Iraqi Army and showed his badge.
At that time, the U.S. Army was creating the new Iraqi army under Paul Bremer (who foolishly disbanded the original Iraqi army) in Baghdad, so the British army arranged for Alkhalidy’s father, who is fluent in English and Arabic, to join the new force. Alkhalidy was 10-years-old when his parents, cousin, brother and he moved to Baghdad, where they resided in the multi-religious neighborhood of Al-Jihad in the west of the city. Unfortunately, trouble followed them.
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Following the collapse of the Iraqi government in 2003, a number of Shiite Islamist groups, specifically the Sadrist Movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr, expanded their influence in southern Iraq. Muqtada, who’s known to have close ties to Iran, created the Mahdi Army, which served as the military branch of the Sadrist Movement and spearheaded the first major Shia confrontation against U.S.-led forces in Iraq.
The Sadrist Movement was part of the shaky United Iraqi Alliance coalition in the 2005 elections in Iraq. The coalition was mainly comprised of Shia Islamist groups, including former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, and had a platform based primarily on national securi- ty and reconstruction. In December, the coalition earned a total of 128 seats, with the Sadrist Movement and the Islamic Virtue Party, a branch of the Sadrist Movement, gaining a total of 44 seats, solidifying their presence in Iraqi politics. At the height of its power in 2005, the Sadrist Movement was strong enough to influence local government through its link with the National Independent Cadres and Elites party, and it was especially popular among police forces.
In February 2006, sectarian violence flared in Iraq after Al-Qaeda, a Sunni Islamist group, bombed the al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest Shiite mosques. This act set off a wave of violence that displaced some 370,000 Iraqis and led many scholars to label it as a civil war. The Mahdi Army was a primary belligerent in the conflict and was accused of operating death squads that targeted Sunnis in Baghdad and southern Iraq. Masked gunmen — allegedly from the Mahdi Army — set up a roadblock in Alkhalidy’s neighborhood of Al-Jihad, checking identification cards and murdering anyone with a Sunni name.
Once again, it was bad to be an “Omar,” and the streets were filled with gunshots.
Masked gunmen — allegedly from the Mahdi Army — set up a roadblock in Alkhalidy’s neighborhood of Al-Jihad, checking identification cards and murdering anyone with a Sunni name.
In the summer of 2006, Alkhalidy was 12-years-old. One day, Alkhalidy’s Sunni neighbor jumped over the wall between their houses to warn his family that the Mahdi Army was coming. Alkhalidy’s family grabbed gold, money, passports and clothes and got into a car headed for Syria. Alkhalidy’s father was still enlisted in the military, so he promised to join them later. Alkhalidy’s last image of Baghdad is of a rocket exploding in one of his neighbor’s houses.
The family settled in Bloudan, Syria. Bloudan, boasting cool summer temperatures, parks, and springs, was once a major tourist destination for Arabs. Alkhalidy spent five years in Syria and described his time there as harmonious and calm. “The people are beautiful,” he said. “There were no problems with Shia and Sunni and Iraqi.”
Alkhalidy’s father was still a doctor with the Iraqi army while the family lived in Bloudan, a position which provided the family with enough money for a good life. When Alkhalidy reflects on life in Syria, he shakes his head. “Now Syria has nothing,” he said.
In 2011, Alkhalidy’s brother was stopped by the Syrian army for driving a car with Damascus plates. “You’re Iraqi,” they told him. “How do you have this car?” Alkhalidy said his brother rented the car, which had a loud-speaker system and siren, something his brother failed to notice or consider. The police believed the car to be linked to incidents that had instigated civil unrest. They beat him with the butt of a rifle, severely injuring his face. Fearing for the safety of his family, Alkhalidy’s father organized two cars so they could flee Syria. Again, Alkhalidy’s family packed up their life in minutes. Again, they ran.
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The family settled in Sulaimani in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region in northern Iraq, where they remain today. In Sulaimani, Alkhalidy doesn’t have to worry about being Sunni, he has to worry about being an Iraqi. From his experience, Kurds hate Iraqis. He is quick to point out not all Kurds, but in all of his five years there, none of his neighbors have even said “Hello” to him.
The Kurd-Iraqi conflict has its roots in British occupation in the early 1900s, but it is Saddam Hussein’s al-Anfal Campaign that most Kurds remember. Led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, who at the time was the secretary general of the Northern Bureau of the Ba’ath Party, the al-Anfal Campaign was a genocidal effort from 1986 to 1989 to rid Iraq of ethnic Kurds. Mass deportations, firing squads and chemical warfare were just some of the tactics used by the regime to exterminate Kurds. The campaign is said to have killed as many as 180,000 people and displaced around 1 million.
British forces lay siege to Basra, Iraq in 2003. (Photo by Rhonda Roth-Cameron)
Kurdish animosity towards Iraqis was recently rekindled when Kurdistan experienced an economic crisis in 2015, the contributing factors of which included the expansion of ISIS, an influx of 1.8 million refugees from Syria and northern Iraq, declining oil prices and an ongoing feud between the central government in Baghdad and the regional government in Erbil. The continuous arrival of refugees in Sulaimani has driven up the price of housing, increased traffic and pollution, and squeezed the already limited number of vacant spots in public high schools and universities.
When Alkhalidy arrived in Sulaimani, there were still places in public high schools for Iraqi kids. He told me he had good grades in high school, but as an Iraqi, he was given an unwarranted low score on a compulsory, standardized test given to all graduating high school seniors. When Alkhalidy went to the Ministry of Education to dispute his scores, he was told he had waited too long. Alkhalidy challenged the government official.
“I told him that even if I had come right away, he wouldn’t have helped me,” Alkhalidy said. “The official told me, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’”
Receiving the low score bars Alkhalidy from attending public university. He said the same is true for most of his other Arab friends. However, a few of Alkhalidy’s friends were able to attend public university because they had connections. For example, one has a Kurdish father who serves in the Peshmerga.
Alkhalidy said the Ministry of Education intentionally gives poor grades to Iraqis to force them to leave Kurdistan. Some private universities, such as the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, admit Iraqi students to undergraduate programs, but they are very expensive whereas public university tuition is nominal. Thus, Alkhalidy became my student by circumstance, not choice. His only hope for a public university education is to study abroad. He hopes to score well on the TOEFL test and study in Turkey.
Alkhalidy said his friends who stayed in Syria are doctors and engineers now, which makes him feel ashamed about his situation. “Look at me,” he said. “I am nothing.”
“I told him that even if I had come right away, he wouldn’t have helped me,” Alkhalidy said. “The official told me, ‘No, I wouldn’t.’”
Alkhalidy is one of many in his generation without hope. He told me he heard a U.S. Army officer once say that the coalition forces “gave Iraq on a plate of gold to Iran.” Alkhalidy doesn’t know if this is true or not. He also doesn’t know if the 2003 invasion was good or bad, because he doesn’t know what Saddam Hussein would have done as president. All he knows is that if he can go abroad, he is going abroad.
“After what happened in Basra and Baghdad,” he said, “I don’t care anymore. Everyone tries to kill me if I leave Kurdistan for Iraq. In Kurdistan, I am Arab. In Iraq, I am Sunni. Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul used to be safe for Sunnis, but that changed with ISIS. Now Iraqi people are hated by the whole world.”
Were I in his shoes, I’d probably feel the same way. Alkhalidy can’t stay where he is, but he has nowhere to go. The Mahdi Army was disbanded in 2008, but in 2014, the senior Shia cleric of Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued an edict calling for Shiite men to fight against ISIS. Sheikh Abbas al-Mahmadawi, the leader of Iraq’s Hezbollah, stated that some 800,000 people responded to the edict, creating a military force significantly larger than the Iraqi Security Forces.
After Ayatollah Sistani’s edict, the Mahdi Army then remobilized as the “Peace Companies” and vowed to defend Baghdad against ISIS. And they weren’t the only Shia militia to do so. Foreign Policy’s Ali Khedery reported in February 2015 that “within months, hundreds of thousands of young Shiites responded to the call — and today, virtually all of them have been absorbed into Iranian-dominated militias, whose fundamental identity is built around a sectarian narrative rather than loyalty to the state.”
ISIS controls a vast swath of northern Iraq, while the Shia militias control the south. Shia militias, like al-Hashd al-Shaabi, guard Baghdad. Militia members sometimes extort money or sexual favors from women and take cars from the Sunni refugees fleeing ISIS. Other times, they deny them entrance into Baghdad, and the refugees disappear.
As fences go up in Europe, as Syria descends further and further into chaos, as the terror attacks in Turkey proliferate, as the Greek economy collapses, ad as certain American Republican presidential candidates spout their xenophobia, I wonder: where can someone like Alkhalidy go?
(Top Image by Adam Emerson)
Originally published at on April 7, 2016.
