Southland’s Native Iraqis Torn by Hatred and Horror

Few Southern Californians feel the personal loathing toward Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein--or the agony of fear over the bombing raids against him--as intensely as Pomona residents Moustafa and Jafar Al-Qazwini.

Fifteen family members in their native Iraq have been imprisoned for opposing Hussein, the brothers say, including an 80-year-old grandfather seized from his home in 1980, dragged through the streets and now presumed dead. The dictator, they say, has subjected their people to hunger and poverty, shortages of medicine, rising birth defects, spiraling crime.

Now, in the aftermath of the bombings by the United States and Britain over the past two days, the brothers fear that even more misery may have been befallen their family. Like many of the estimated 50,000 Iraqi natives in Southern California--the country’s second-largest Iraqi community--the Al-Qazwini family is caught in the cross-fire of a brutal showdown between the leaders of their native land and their adopted home; torn between hatred for Hussein and horror over a U.S.-led attack that might have harmed loved ones.

Watching news broadcasts of the raids Wednesday night, their mother weeping beside them, the men found they could barely control themselves. Frantic attempts to contact their family in Iraq have not been successful.

“My legs were shivering, because I’ve been through bombings before,” said Moustafa Al-Qazwini, who arrived here in 1994 and serves as the imam, or religious leader, of the Assadiq Foundation in Pomona and the Islamic Educational Center in Irvine. “I know what the horrors are like.”

Iraqi natives around the Southland shared similar tales this week, providing a glimpse of the human tragedies of oppression and exile that form an unhappy common denominator among them. The exiles range from unschooled farmers to offspring of wealthy diplomats, but stand united in a fervent desire to topple Hussein from power, usher in a representative government and bring prosperity to a homeland afflicted by disease, deprivation and despair.

Haleema Shaikley, an Iraqi exile who is a dentist in Upland, received a call from her relatives Wednesday morning just before the bombing began, asking for antibiotics for a sick nephew. She tried calling them several times Thursday.

“I feel terrible. I don’t know what’s going on. They just cannot take any more,” said Shaikley, who last traveled to Iraq in October on a humanitarian mission.

She left Iraq in 1976 when, she said, she began seeing the first signs of injustice under the Hussein regime: fellow Kurds being forcibly uprooted from their villages; students being graded not on ability but on political beliefs.

But conditions in Iraq today are “beyond human description,” she said. On a recent humanitarian mission, Shaikley said she saw a rash of birth defects--three children born without eyes, genitals or forearms on one street alone. One mother tearfully told her how she had ended up beating her child to sleep to silence his pitiful wails of hunger.

Schooling has been badly disrupted by a shortage of desks, paper and books, even shoes children can wear to class, she said. Crime is rife, born of grinding need, in a place where people once left their doors open and openly trusted each other, she added.

“Iraq used to be a place of pride,” she said. “Now people are very depressed, helpless and hopeless.”

Community leaders say the largest group of Iraqi immigrants--an estimated 150,000--is in the Detroit area, with Southern California, and in particular San Diego, the next-largest region of settlement. Among them, a wave of about 23,500 refugees fled Iraq in the early 1990s, after participating in unsuccessful uprisings against Hussein following the Gulf War, said Mazin Yousif, the Irvine-based director of the national Free Iraq campaign.

The recent exiles--most of them possessing little English, schooling or job skills--joined an older community of well-educated professionals who came here to study or work two or three decades ago, Yousif said. Although many came to Los Angeles initially, many moved on to San Diego, which has a more cohesive Islamic community and where Iraqis operate thousands of liquor and convenience stores, he said.

Dire Prediction That Came True

Yousif, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was one of the early arrivals; his relatives remain in Iraq but he has been unable to reach them. Raised in an elite atmosphere of boating, horseback riding and annual trips to Europe as a diplomat’s son, Yousif said his father predicted the nation would deteriorate soon after Hussein’s Arab Baath Socialist Party took power in 1968.

“He is not a politician, not a diplomat,” Yousif says his father told the family about Hussein. “He is a street thug. I can truly see a dark future for the country.”

Faced with Hussein’s ultimatum to join him or retire, Yousif’s father left in 1975; the son followed him to England three years later. Now he works with 80 other Iraqi leaders in the United States to indict Hussein for crimes against humanity, lift the economic embargo on the Iraqi people and implement the United Nations human-rights resolution in Iraq.

Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council said his cousin died of kidney disease a few years ago because he could not obtain medicine or proper surgical care; several other family members have been tortured and killed for opposing the Hussein regime. His family migrated to the United States in 1972; both father and son studied engineering here.

But the liberty immigrants find here has had an insidious effect on family cohesion and discipline, said Mosadek Al Attar, administrator of the City of Knowledge Islamic school in Pomona. Fearful of losing their children to the decadent lures of American culture, a group of Iraqi leaders opened the school in 1994. The associated Assadiq Foundation, which offers Islamic religious, cultural and social services, opened in 1997.

The number of students has grown from an initial 19 to 150. Among them is 13-year-old Hadi Al-Qazwini, who says he can freely pray the requisite five times daily and be free of taunts--”You’re a terrorist! You’re Saddam Hussein’s people!”--that drove him to tears at his public school.

Plans are underway to develop an assembly hall, theater and gymnasium; community leaders also dream of establishing an Islamic library and home for the elderly.

Even as Iraqis long for the liberation of their homeland, they are putting down roots in their new country.

“If Saddam Hussein stays in power, this area may become Little Baghdad,” Al-Qazwini said.