Between high unemployment and high risk

The letter arrived at Hassim Mohammed’s house a few months after he had started his new job. “If you work for an American company, we will kill you,” it said.

It was not signed, but Mohammed didn’t need a name. The simple, one-line threat was convincing enough.

The civil engineer quit his job with the American company six months ago and began looking for work elsewhere, but found nothing. Unemployment is high, and pay at most Iraqi companies is low, so Mohammed put on a suit Saturday and put his life on the line once more.

He came to a job fair, joining hundreds of other Iraqis vying for work with U.S. firms or with Iraqi firms doing business with Americans.

“It’s dangerous, but life must go on,” Mohammed said, reflecting the combination of fatalism and desperation driving many Iraqis to risk their lives, family ties and in some cases their marriages for a decent salary.

Standing beside him, Mohammed Aboud described the fight he and his wife had had that morning as she tried to stop him from coming to the fair.

“She said, ‘Look at our three kids. If you work for Americans, you might get killed and you will leave them,’ ” Aboud said. But as a civil engineer working for an Iraqi firm, he’d be lucky to earn the equivalent of $300 a month, a fraction of what the companies at the job fair would pay.

Brought together by need

The job fair was the second since June to be put on by the U.S.-run National Iraqi Assistance Center. The first one drew 430 job-seekers. Four hundred came Saturday, said Navy Capt. Lance Carr, the center’s director. Engineers and information technology experts were most in demand, he said.

“There are so many highly qualified people looking for work here. They’re hungry for employment,” Carr said as he stood in an overheated conference room at the Rashid Hotel, within the relatively secure confines of the Green Zone, home to U.S. and Iraqi government offices.

Plates of elaborately frosted cakes and soft, buttery cookies lined a table at the back of the room, but job-seekers ignored them and instead closed in around small tables. Like speed daters eager to impress in a limited time, the unemployed shifted from one table to the next, producing resumes, shaking hands and trying not to sweat.

Some wore pressed suits and smiled confidently as they produced professional-looking resumes. Others wore rumpled sweaters, clutching hand-scrawled resumes and making no attempt to conceal their desperation. There were Shiite and Sunni Arabs and Kurds, a cross-section of Iraqi society brought together by need.

“I need the work very much,” Ali Ibrahim Radhi said, thrusting his resume at the table staffed by representatives of the Taha-Kubba Group, an Iraqi company looking for engineers and other professionals to work on major construction projects.

“I will call,” a Taha-Kubba representative said.

“I hope so,” Radhi said. “All I dream of is to have a job and food for my family. Since ‘03, no job, no work, no salary, no money. I am broke.”

Behind him, Abdul Hamid, dressed in a tattered, mud-colored sweater and baggy trousers, nervously pushed his handwritten resume forward. Until December, he had been working as an engineer with an American company, but on Dec. 9, armed men burst into his home and shot him and his three children.

They all survived, but Hamid, a Shiite who had been living in a mainly Sunni neighborhood, was terrified. He quit his job, abandoned the house and moved his family to his mother’s home outside Baghdad.

“When I ran away, I saw bodies in the street with my own eyes,” Hamid said.

Asked whether he was afraid of working for a company such as Taha-Kubba, whose Baghdad headquarters are in the Green Zone, Hamid laughed. “Of course I am scared,” he said. Tears suddenly filled his eyes, and he turned away.

For the 11 firms at the job fair, collecting resumes and applications was not a problem, but holding onto employees will be. People start drifting away once they realize how dangerous and isolating it can be working for one of these companies. Sometimes that happens even before they start working.

Rodney Santiago, a consultant working as a Taha-Kubba recruiter, said that among 30 hires made as a result of the June job fair, two remained with the firm.

Many of Taha-Kubba’s employees live in the Green Zone in housing provided by the company and earn as much as $3,000 a month. They are safer living here than elsewhere, but risk having their jobs and living arrangements discovered if they go home on their days off.

Some simply remain inside the grim, high-walled confines of the Green Zone, but eventually they miss their families, quit and go home. Santiago told of a doctor who had taken a job as an accountant so he could live in the Green Zone and was refusing to step outside until his visa to go to the United States came through.

Brain drain

The desire to emigrate contributes to the brain drain that Santiago says threatens the country’s development.

“You need the people who have fled to come back and fuel the country,” he said. He estimated that only 10% of potential employees had the English-speaking skills the firm needed.

Throughout the morning and into midafternoon, job-seekers snaked from the conference room door through a hallway, and down the Rashid’s marble steps to a lobby decorated with huge potted plants. Outside, more waited to get in. Like nightclub patrons on a busy Saturday night, only a few were let through the hotel’s main door at a time, as others trickled out.

By the end of the day, Carr said, at least 300 resumes had been collected and scores of educated Iraqis had made contact with potential employers.

“Our goal is to get everyone a job. That’s not possible,” he said, “but this is at least opening a connection for them.”

One of those who seemed optimistic about finding work was Ghaith Harith, a towering former project manager whose fluency in English and experience with U.S. firms clearly impressed one interviewer. After an initial conversation with the employer that lasted far longer than most, Harith was directed to the company’s human resources manager.

He smiled broadly as he walked away, but when asked whether he would tell anyone if he got a job with the firm, Harith replied, “Impossible. No way.”

susman@latimes.com