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Do you remember Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain? They were the two Albany Muslim men who, shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, were set up by the FBI to appear as supporters of terrorism and were sent to prison for 15 years apiece.
They served their time and are now free — Mohammed, a U.S. citizen, returned to his quiet life renovating dilapidated houses in Albany; Yassin was deported to Kurdistan, an autonomous region within his native Iraq.
I see Mohammed from time to time, and now a small group of us who have supported the two men over the years have seen Yassin. We were two lawyers, Steve Downs and Kathy Manley; Kathy’s daughter, Diana Morales; one Albany activist, Lynne Jackson; plus me and my wife, Pearl.
We flew to Istanbul and from there to Sulaymaniyah, a principal city of Kurdistan, and we survived to tell the tale, though it wasn’t always easy. Yassin – known in Kurdish culture by that single name — and his extended family so stuffed us with kabobs and sticky sweets, and so overwhelmed us with gratitude and friendship, that at times we were in danger of exploding.
It was an adventure. We climbed mountains, we prowled bazaars, we visited museums, we took pictures of each other taking pictures of each other, and for the first time I saw Yassin as something more than an isolated individual up against the FBI and desperate to redeem itself. I saw him as a husband, a son, a father and — heaven help us — a cousin. I didn’t know it was possible to have so many cousins, all of them ready to be offended if we didn’t agree to be their guests for dinner, or at least for post-dinner tea and fruit.
And I saw him as a Kurd, a category of humanity that I was previously only vaguely aware of. It was the Kurds who were the targets of Saddam Hussein’s notorious poison gassing in the 1980s, if anyone remembers that, a campaign that killed more than 100,000 people in the city of Halabja and its surrounding villages, among them Yassin’s own village of Hashaziny.
We visited what remains of the place, where once stood a hundred houses and lived a hundred families. We saw the new, rebuilt mosque, containing the grave of Yassin’s great-grandfather, a religious leader who founded the village. We ate lunch there, outdoors, off a cloth spread on the ground. And a few miles away we saw the unfinished monument to his cousin Marf Gul, an academic who studied the infamous genocide.
He escorted us around nonstop, from the Halabja museum commemorating the deaths there to another museum commemorating the months-long campaign to destroy and depopulate the villages of the area, following the notorious Chemical Ali’s promise to “leave no one alive who speaks the Kurdish language.”
We saw the photos of stacked bodies, the relics of charred sandals and melted pacifiers, reminiscent of Holocaust remembrances, and we knew that for Yassin to say he was Kurdish meant something more than for me to say I’m a New Yorker.
Late one night when we wearily desired to return to our lodgings, he drove us through desolate terrain to a marble mansion with guards lounging out front. Inside, we were invited to take our places in a fantasy recreation of a Versailles conference room — all chandeliers and gilded, voluptuously sculpted armchairs that would make Louis XIV himself envious.
Dour-looking men (no women in these precincts) filled the chairs and lined the wall – retainers, or flunkies, the entourage of a powerful man, who turned out to be the solid-looking fellow dressed in black, there on one side. He was the commanding general of Iraq’s military in this region, one Sherzad Aziz, a Kurd himself, and a childhood acquaintance of Yassin, who invited me to say a few words of greeting.
“Your Majesty,” I very nearly began, “how does it happen that an army general gets to reside in a knockoff of the Palace of Versailles and have a couple dozen flunkies on hand to receive callers at the ungodly hour of midnight?” But I held my tongue.
Yassin took us also to rub shoulders with the governor of the province, Havel Abubaker, who graciously invited us to lunch and thereby became the only governor with whom I have partaken of grilled sheep’s testicles.
Yassin hauled our wearying carcasses to the headquarters of the Hamawand tribe, where we were received by the tribal chief himself, Shekha Mamad Agaha, who, like the governor, mistook us for important people and treated us accordingly.
Then to an audience with the esteemed Ali Bapir, former head of an Islamic group and now head of the Kurdistan Justice Group. A religious scholar (during his 22-month imprisonment by American forces he wrote an eight-volume encyclopedia of Islam), he was a jovial fellow with a ready smile and a twinkle in the eye, known among other things for killing his own brother, who had villainously cooperated with Saddam Hussein. I took an immediate liking to him, and we posed for more photos, always with Yassin displaying the new Kurdish-language book he has written about his years of imprisonment.
At all these meetings our hosts patted their hearts, and we patted ours, and we were friends.
It took us a while to figure out, with Yassin’s eventual cooperation, what was going on here, but in the end it was simple enough. A meeting with the head of an audiobook outfit, Agora Vision, provided the clue. Yassin wants his new book translated into English and published, and that costs money — money he does not have. More, he wants the time and freedom to continue writing, which is his passion and his great talent.
So he’s looking for support — a pension, a grant, maybe a job — and in Kurdish tradition that can happen only on the endorsement of a powerful personage. As he explained in his earlier book, the autobiographical “Son of Mountains,” there is no civil service in Kurdistan, only patronage.
During his long imprisonment, and his earlier residence in Syria as a refugee, he explained, he had fallen behind his peers, who went on to get graduate degrees and become professionals, or who bought into the political parties that followed the 1991 uprising against Saddam and were granted no-show jobs as mayors of villages they didn’t live in — jobs that provided salaries, houses, cars, even bodyguards, followed by pensions.
Returning as a 50-year-old after an absence of 24 years, Yassin had nothing. He and his wife inhabit a small but comfortable house in the town of Chamchamal, thanks to family generosity, but otherwise he scratches out a living doing electrical construction work for $16 a day — yes, a day. And it’s not even steady work.
He’s a writer, a poet, an intellectual, and a forceful personality to boot. He has his new book in hand, and he wants to get it out.
Political parties in Kurdistan, afloat on oil wealth, hand out benefits and sinecures the way parties in the U.S. hand out bumper stickers, and he wishes for a piece of that largesse. He told me he figures he has 10 years to “build something,” meaning some form of financial security.
These heavyweights could pull the right strings for him if they wanted to, but first he had to meet them, and our presence helped him do that. It wasn’t just him requesting an audience; it was now him backed by a distinguished delegation from America.
So there we were, bumbling Albany emissaries, treated to red carpets and diplomatic speeches in between mountain hikes and lavish dinners, lending an unanticipated hand to a survivor of America’s War on Terror.
Carl Strock, a former columnist with The Daily Gazette, wrote extensively about the case of Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain at the time of their arrest and trial, between 2004 and 2007. He lives in Saratoga Springs.