Refugee escapes Iraq, finds shaky future in U.S.

By Brigid Schulte

updated 6:02 a.m. ET March 7, 2007

Hussein Hayal al Zaidi says he spent nearly four years in jail in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, once in a 13-by-13-foot cell with 20 other men. His captors blindfolded him and pummeled his eyes, detaching one of his retinas. He has scars on his ankles, feet and hands from where they strung him up with ropes and beat him. His genitalia bear the marks of electric shock burns.

He was sentenced to death in 1999 for participating in an anti-Hussein riot, al Zaidi said. An uncle paid $7,000 to smuggle him out of jail and out of Iraq. He was flown from Syria to Moscow to Cuba to Ecuador before arriving at an airport in Newark, disoriented and ill. He asked for asylum.

An immigration officer in Newark believed his story and let him stay. But an immigration judge in Arlington County, who heard final arguments on his case 10 days after Sept. 11, 2001, did not believe him.

She ordered him deported.

But, like 165 others, the Northern Virginia man cannot be deported. Since the war in Iraq began in 2003, the United States has followed a United Nations directive not to forcibly return Iraqis to their country because it is too dangerous.

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Al Zaidi's fate was decided at a time when places such as Anbar province, Nasiriyah and Ramallah had yet to become almost household words. Trial transcripts show that U.S. immigration prosecutors and judges had little idea what a Sunni or a Shiite was or why they would want to kill one another.

Since then, al Zaidi has become part of the largest refugee crisis unfolding in the Middle East in decades, with one in eight Iraqis having fled their homes or the country. In the process, he has become one more story of the fallout of war.

'I am already dead'
When al Zaidi's appeal of the deportation order was denied in September 2005, immigration officials picked him up at his job at a laundromat and put him in jail, where he stayed until June. He was released, because detainees who can't be deported but pose no threat can't be held for more than six months.

So al Zaidi, 39, lives like a dangling man, in limbo between the hell of his past and fears of a hellish future. In the United States, government officials had suspected he might be an agent of Hussein. In Iraq, he fears that his countrymen, suspicious of his long absence, will think he works for the CIA.

"Of course they're going to kill me," he said in accented English. If not the Shiite militia already asking about him, then the Sunnis or Hussein loyalists. "But I am already dead."

Before he was detained, when he still had hope of staying in the United States, al Zaidi saved money. He thought about buying a house and having a family. He listened to English-language tapes. But now, nothing matters. He started smoking unfiltered Marlboros again. He spends his days watching television, not really paying attention. On a whim, he bought a new car.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he said. "Before, I was careful. But now, for what? Let me enjoy."

Except that he doesn't.

Since his release, he has lived with a friend in a bare townhouse in Vienna, furnished with two white plastic chairs and a TV. The laundromat doesn't want him anymore. Because of his immigration status, the community college he had hoped to attend will not take him. He doesn't eat, except for coffee and nibbles of junk food, such as the packets of Oreos and Mentos strewn on the floor of his room among piles of legal papers. His bed is a sheet on the floor, his pillow a rolled-up winter jacket.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he is seized with the notion that he must see the ocean. He goes to Atlantic City. He watches the waves. He doesn't understand what is happening to him.

"It's like I destroy my life."

Setback in a U.S. court
Some people have believed al Zaidi. A doctor at George Washington University concluded that al Zaidi "did indeed suffer the torture and abuse that he claims." And a psychoanalyst diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, writing that "he has suffered a process of brutal human degradation."

In February 2001, he told his story on the stand in U.S. immigration court in Arlington. Al Zaidi said he had been drafted into the Army, like all other Iraqi men, and served as a mail clerk during the Iran-Iraq war.

His first arrest, he said through a translator, came in 1991 for participating in an uprising against Hussein after the Persian Gulf War. When his mother tried to bar police officers from their home, they hit her in the head, he said, and killed her.

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