For Many Iraqis in U.S., It’s a Matter of Torn Loyalties : Immigrants: Some find themselves angry at both President Bush and Saddam Hussein.

For two long days, Yasin Al-Khalesi, a professor of Arabic at UCLA, has imagined as he listened to news reports of American warplanes bombing Baghdad that his own father was running from the bombs, helplessly seeking a place to hide.

“It is unbelievably painful,” he said Thursday. “It is almost like a dream. Our families are there, we are here. We are completely cut off. . . . No, it is worse than that. It is like a part of you has been cut off.”

Across the country, many of the estimated 150,000 Iraqi-born residents of the United States sit at home alone or with friends, unable to contact their parents and children, and the many aunts, uncles and neighbors that make up their extended Iraqi families.

They face an isolation unimaginable just a few months ago, when they could telephone their families directly and send faxes to business associates in the ancient center of Baghdad itself.

“We are in the dark,” said Al-Khalesi, who is in his mid-40s and has lived in Los Angeles for 22 years.

There were, of course, precursors to the cutoff. Starting about Christmas, mail service to Iraq ended, and Christmas cards were returned by the U.S. Postal Service. Telephone service began to deteriorate, and circuits were constantly busy. Every day, a designated relative would sit for hours, patiently trying to get through. The fortunate ones who managed to do so found conversations hopeful, but truncated, with family on both sides afraid to say anything more than “Allah kareem,” an Arabic phrase meaning “God is good.”

For Iraqis in the United States, the only thing worse than listening to the sounds of bombs exploding, picked up by microphones placed by American reporters on their hotel window sills in Baghdad early Thursday, was the silence that followed when the reports ended later in the day.

As U.S. military analysts spoke of the success of the sorties, these Iraqi-Americans say they saw in their mind’s eye the destruction of neighborhoods that hugged strategic refineries, factories and military bases. Few believed the early reports that there have been only a handful of civilian casualties.

Sam Yosso, president of the Chaldean Federation of America, which represent 60,000 Iraqi Christians in the Detroit area, took phone calls constantly in his small office as Iraqi-Americans tried to console each other.

“See the look on my face?” he asked. “It is horror. It is fear. I picture myself being in Baghdad as I was . . . in May when I went to visit my family. I wonder what’s going on in their minds if they are alive, and where they are laying if they are dead.”

Since the war started, some said, everything they see, everything they feel, serves to remind them that now, more than they ever knew, they are truly hyphenated Americans--U.S. citizens in their heads, Iraqis in their hearts.

Many Iraqis have come to this country over the last 30 years, most seeking freedom and opportunity. Many eagerly became U.S. citizens, voting regularly and becoming active in business and academic circles. Large numbers settled in Detroit, finding work on the assembly lines in the Motor City. Los Angeles attracted an estimated 15,000. Coming from Iraq, one of the most literate countries in the Middle East, many of them are professionals.

Many Iraqi-Americans interviewed in the past two days expressed anger at both Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi president, and at President Bush, the man many of them voted for two years ago. Stunned, they cannot believe it has actually come to this: the country they adopted is attacking the country of their birth.

In Detroit, Faisal Arabo, producer of a television program called “Arab Voice,” sat in his studio surrounded by TV monitors showing multiple images of troops, tanks and bombers preparing to attack his homeland.

“We are born in Iraq, but we are U.S. citizens,” Arabo said. “Just think what it is like when soldiers from our motherland are going to fight soldiers from the United States, which is like our fatherland. We find our mother and father are trying to kill each other. And not for the interests of our children--but for somebody else’s interests. Whose? As American citizens we have to ask ourselves that.”

Al-Khalesi said he has watched the faces of American pilots as they returned from war, proud of their mission. “I can understand that somehow,” he said. “As an American, that makes sense to me. But pilots do not see their casualties. They hit from a distance and do not look back. But I can imagine people lying on the ground behind them.”

Fuad Killu, 55, an Iraqi-born U.S. citizen who writes a column for the Los Angeles-based Beirut Times, watched helplessly in his Glendale apartment as TV newsmen talked of Baghdad’s Doura oil refinery being bombed.

The refinery is directly across the Tigris River from the home he still owns in the Iraqi capital. Two of his three grown children still live there. He imagined them closing the shutters against the onslaught, and hiding under a cement staircase in fear as clouds of smoke thick with oil billowed across the river.

His wife, Ayda Rashid, has an 18-year-old son from a previous marriage and several sisters in Baghdad.

“No one is safe there. To destroy one man (Saddam Hussein), must they destroy a whole country?” she asked, tears streaming down her face. “What’s the use of my being here when they are there? If there is a way, I will go. I will be there.”

But the Saddam International Airport in Baghdad was reportedly struck in the American attack and, late Thursday, Royal Jordanian Airlines, the last carrier offering flights to any nearby destination, canceled its flight to Amman.

Still, one Iraqi-American woman in Detroit boarded a plane to Cairo, determined to find some way to reach her two young daughters in Baghdad.

“I tried to talk her out of it,” said an Iraqi-American travel agent in Detroit, who asked she not be named. “But she would not listen. She told me, ‘Better whatever should happen to my two daughters should happen to me first.’ And she took off this morning.”

Times researcher Amy Harmon in Detroit contributed to this report.