To Be a Friend Is Fatal (39 page)

From:
The State Department

To:
Omar

Date:
Sunday, October 9, 2011. 8:29 a.m.

Dear Applicant,

Please be informed that your application is in process but we still need a VALID official email address for a supervisor or HR officer who can identify you and verify your employment and a copy of the CONTRACT between your company of employment and the U.S. Government so that we continue processing with your application normally. Please note that we need this to prove that your employment was funded by U.S. Government through an official contract or agreement.

If you could not provide us with required contract number
please print and read the attached form carefully and then fill it, sign it, scan it and finally send it back to us
, so that we be able to help by trying to contact your former employer for the information.

Please reply directly to this email and do NOT change the subject line.

Thank you.

Shortly after they arrived in my in-box, I spread Omar's documents and emails out across my kitchen table, trying to arrange them in chronological order. When I ran out of space, I used the chairs, then the floor, and then the walls.

A picture of the man was emerging. Omar had driven a forklift for the US Army in Forward Operating Base Warrior, where he helped to load and unload shipments of food, vehicle parts, medical equipment, and other materials for our troops. His support letters glowed with praise: “Your dedicated service to the U.S. is appreciated and will not be forgotten,” and “Your commitment, dedication, and efforts to ensuring all missions were accomplished to the highest of standards in support of the American warfighter.”

In one email, I found a scan of his passport, which he obtained a couple months after first applying for refuge in America. He was my brother Derek's age and kept his hair cropped short for his passport picture. There is a very faint sense of a smile.

But after I located his initial application—submitted six months before the end of the war—and the first response he received from the State Department, I knew at once that something was terribly wrong. Although he had submitted six letters of commendation from Americans in his first email, I wondered why State was asking a forklift operator who did not speak English to locate a copy of the federal contract under which he worked.

I searched through the stack of pages for the next round of correspondence, which occurred two weeks after President Obama announced the end of the Iraq War:

From:
Omar

To:
The State Department

Date:
Saturday, December 31, 2011. 9:46 a.m.

Peace and respect for everyone who works in your office. My brothers, I wonder if there's any news that you might share with me? What is the latest with my case? With great thanks.

From:
The State Department

To:
Omar

Date:
Wednesday, January 4, 2012. 3:50 p.m.

Dear Sir/Ma'am,

Thank you for your email.

We have checked your case and found that it's in processing pending verifying your employment.

Please note that once you are scheduled for an interview he will be contacted.

Your patience does assist us in accelerating the process.

Six months had already passed since he applied, and although the State Department had apparently stopped asking for a copy of the federal contract number, it was now requesting contact information for someone who could verify Omar's employment history. This was despite the
fact that his original application included the names of ten American supervisors, seven of which were active soldiers in the US Army.

The State Department wouldn't do anything with his case until it received yet another email address, for some reason, but Omar was struggling with a deteriorating sense of his security in Kirkuk. He drafted his next letter in bright red, as if to underscore the urgency of his situation:

From:
Omar

To:
The State Department

Date:
Thursday, February 16, 2012. 5:23 a.m.

Peace and respect to you all. I'd like to explain some of the critical developments that have happened to me in Kirkuk. I feel that I'm in a very critical situation. My security situation isn't good, and I'm seeking your guidance.

I fear for my life and the life of my family, and I'm asking for you to help me by transferring my case to a neighboring country. If you were able to transfer my file to Turkey, then my family and I will go to finish the visa process there.

I await your speedy reply, God Willing.

From:
The State Department

To:
Omar

Date:
Tuesday, February 21, 2012. 2:38 p.m.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your email.

As per our phone conversation and as you were counseled regarding your wish to transfer your case to turkey, Please be informed that this program (Direct Access) is only run in Iraq, Jordan and Egypt. If you were in United Arab Emirates or Lebanon, please check with [email protected]

Please note that you have to provide us with different contact info (Official Email address) for a supervisor or HR officer who can identify you and verify your employment.

Once we receive this, we will proceed with your case.

Kind Regards,

State soon sent another email to say that even if Omar fled, there were no guarantees that his application would be processed. They also pasted in the same form language, requesting “different contact info” for a supervisor or HR officer who could verify his employment.

A few days later, Omar sent the name of his cousin in America, who was sponsoring his application for resettlement.

The response was becoming distressingly familiar:

From:
The State Department

To:
Omar

Date:
Sunday, March 11, 2012. 10:13 a.m.

Dear Sir/ Ma'am,

Thank you for your email.

Kindly be advised that your case is still missing please note that you have to provide us with different contact info (Official Email address) for a supervisor or HR officer who can identify you and verify your employment. (The email address must be an official one—not yahoo, Gmail, MSN, hotmail, etc.)

Once we receive this, we will proceed with your case.

Kindly be informed that we checked your case and found that it is in processing pending verifying your employment documents. Once it is completed we will move forward with your case.

Your patience does assist us in accelerating the process.

I wondered who came up with the final line, which was used in nearly every email exchange with Omar. If I had learned anything in five years of engaging with the State Department, it was that patience is not an accelerant within the engines of bureaucracy.

The day after Omar was told to be patient, the Lightning Brigade of the Ansar al-Sunnah Army—a known Al-Qaeda affiliate in Iraq—delivered a letter to him.

Omar had already stopped working for the Americans; the war was over and they were gone, but the Ansar al-Sunnah militia was untroubled by such distinctions:

To the atheist agent Omar,

You are warned that if you do not accept the orders of the mujahideen by leaving your work with the American forces, your work as a spy . . . we have warned you many times before, but you did not heed them, nor did you return to the correct path, so we, the army of Ansar al-Sunnah in Iraq, have decided to carry out the punishment of execution if you do not leave your work. . . .

I taped the death threat to my kitchen wall and sifted anxiously through the remaining pages of correspondence. These were the desperate pleas of a hunted man, and I struggled against the direction in which these emails were headed. In one letter, Omar wrote to say that he'd fled to Turkey the day after receiving the threat, hoping to find work and an apartment in which his family could stay while his application was processed. After a few weeks, though, he realized that he would be forbidden from working in Turkey, so he returned to Kirkuk. He began to move his wife and five-year-old son from house to house, hiding from the Ansar al-Sunnah.

In every letter he'd received from the State Department until this point, he'd been asked for the contact information of a “different” American supervisor. In late March, his cousin in America finally located the email address of one of Omar's first bosses, a materials manager for Parsons, one of the major US reconstruction contractors. Omar excitedly sent the contact info to the State Department.

A few days later, on April 5, the State Department's Iraqi Employment Verification Unit wrote to the Parsons supervisor, asking him to confirm Omar's work. His supervisor responded with a confirmation letter exactly twenty-five minutes later.

It seemed, as I read the next exchange, that the impasse had finally been broken:

From:
The State Department

To:
Omar

Date:
Monday, April 9, 2012. 8:09 a.m.

Dear Sir/Ma'am,

Thank you for your email.

We have received the POC below in your email and it has been added to your case file.

You will be contacted in the future for any further updates.

Kind Regards.

From:
Omar

To:
The State Department

Date:
Monday, April 9, 2012. 5:45 p.m.

Peace and greetings, my brothers. Now that you have the official email address, I'm wondering whether my file might be transferred to Jordan. Are there any steps left that I need to do?

I need resolution: the time is passing here. I don't own anything. I don't work. I'm moving from house to house, from here to there. I beg you to find a solution. Please call me.

I could hardly believe the State Department's subsequent reply. Less than ten days after informing Omar that it had received the employment verification letter from his Parsons supervisor, the following poorly written email was sent:

From:
The State Department

To:
Omar

Date:
Tuesday, April 17, 2012. 1:41 p.m.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your for your email.

We have checked your case and found that it's in processing your employment verification.

Please understand that the process is lengthy and might need a long period of time.

Your patience does assist us in accelerating the process.

Since your employment has been verified yet you aren't advised to transfer your case to Jordan.

Kind Regards

All I could think of was Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long's 1940 cable, in which he ordered his consuls to “put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.” After all, Omar had submitted far more documentation than the State Department requires from refugees of any other country on the planet, but they kept asking him for more. And each time he gave them what they asked for, they asked for something else.

On May 22, seven weeks after it had received a letter from one of Omar's many American bosses that verified his employment, the State Department—as if all record of that letter had suddenly vanished—once again sent an email to Omar requesting “different contact info” for a supervisor. “We will proceed with your case once you provide us with the official email address of someone who can verify your employment,” it promised.

On June 9, 2012, 338 days after submitting his application for refuge in America, Omar's cell phone rang. It had been seven years since he took his first job with the Americans. He had just finished dinner with his wife and young son in one of the many temporary safe houses he was shuttling his family through.