KHULOOD DID NOT flee Iraq alone. She crossed back into Jordan with her next-eldest sister, Sahar, and they were joined in Amman a few months later by their father and oldest sister, Teamim. Choosing to stay on in Iraq were Khulood’s three brothers, along with her mother, Aziza. By summer 2007, Khulood was especially worried about Wisam, her youngest brother. “The war then was at its worst,” she said, “and young men were just being taken from the streets. I called Wisam all the time. I told him there was no future for him in Iraq, that he had to come out, but he was very softhearted and said that he needed to stay to take care of our mother.”
One evening that September, as Wisam and a friend walked along a Kut street, a car pulled up alongside, and someone with an assault rifle killed them both in a burst of gunfire. “He was twenty-five,” Khulood said softly. “Some people say he was killed because of the work I was doing, but I hope that isn’t true.”
A few months after Wisam’s murder, Khulood faced a new ordeal when, working for an NGO, she rebuffed the demands of a corrupt but well-placed Jordanian businessman looking for kickbacks. He was the wrong person to cross. Shortly after, she was ordered to leave Jordan. Facing almost certain death if forced to return to Iraq, Khulood turned to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for emergency resettlement in a third country.
Among the more unlikely possibilities for resettlement was the United States. In 2008, American troops were still embroiled in an Iraqi civil war, and the Bush administration had strict caps in place (albeit recently loosened) on the number of Iraqis to be given refuge; to let in all those who had fled the country—and there were an estimated half million displaced Iraqis in Jordan alone—would belie its talking point that the corner had finally been turned in the war. In light of the grave danger Khulood faced, however, the UNHCR placed her in its own special program, reserved for only the most vulnerable of refugees, and for those in this pool, the Americans had a spot available. In July 2008, Khulood boarded a plane bound for San Francisco.
It’s hard to imagine a more extreme transition, from the cramped, tumbledown apartment she had shared with her father and two sisters in Amman to a pleasant one-bedroom in San Francisco, but with the help of a group of solicitous new friends, Khulood soon reveled in her transformed life. “Just to have the freedom to go wherever I wanted, and to not think something bad might happen to me. And I don’t mean just the war. For a woman to travel alone in Iraq—maybe it happened in Baghdad, but never in Kut, and so some days I would just take a bus or the metro for hours. It was something I had never really imagined before.”
The move produced moments of cultural dissonance. One of Khulood’s new friends urged her to smile more. “You’re in California now. Everyone here smiles all the time.”
The young woman from Kut found this suggestion quite baffling. In Iraq, women were taught to wear a stern face in public and to avoid eye contact with men so as to not be mistaken for prostitutes, but Khulood, eager to fit into her new American home, dutifully practiced smiling in front of her bathroom mirror. She soon suspected she was doing something wrong, because whenever she displayed her new demeanor on the streets of San Francisco, it drew unwanted attention, especially from homeless men. Her friend hastily amended her advice. “You don’t need to smile at everyone.”
Another change was her career horizons. In Iraq, Khulood studied English because it seemed to offer the greatest chance at future freedom for a young woman, but in the United States, the opportunities were endless. “After one year, I would get my green card, and then I could apply for scholarships to study whatever I wanted. I became very ambitious, thinking of all the things I might want to do.”
The one continuing source of worry was for her divided family back in Iraq and Jordan. While she knew those in Kut wouldn’t leave, Khulood was desperate to release her father and sisters from their limbo existence in Amman, and, soon after reaching San Francisco, she started the paperwork to have them join her.
Three months later, Khulood received both good and bad news. Her two sisters were approved for resettlement. Their father, however, was rejected. Khulood’s sisters remained in Jordan while the family appealed the decision, but Ali al-Zaidi was rejected again.
By February 2009, seven months after Khulood’s arrival in San Francisco, there was still no progress in the effort to win resettlement for her father. It was then she made a fateful decision: she would return to Jordan and work on his case there.
“My friends in San Francisco couldn’t understand it,” she recalled. “Why, when you have a new life here, why would you ever go back?” Khulood grew thoughtful for a moment, as if still struggling for an answer. “But how to explain my culture to them? In Iraq, family is the most important thing, you can never turn away from it, so how could I and my sisters enjoy this nice life in America but leave our father behind? We could never live with the shame of that. So I went back.”
In Amman, Khulood tirelessly pursued any angle she could think of to win her father’s exit, petitioning for settlement not just in the United States but also in a half dozen European nations. Nothing worked.
Worse, Khulood had walked herself into legal limbo. As she had been warned before leaving San Francisco, under the stipulations of American immigration law, refugees awaiting the permanent status of a green card cannot leave the country for longer than six months. By returning—and staying—in Jordan, Khulood had lost her refugee classification. Now, along with the part of her family that she had brought out of Iraq, Khulood was stranded, equally unable to go home or to a third country, hostage to the whim of a state—Jordan—that was anxious to shed her.