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Asylum: Found, Lost & Found Again
Janet McGiffin / December 1, 2008
Ansam’s story has a happy ending. But the beginning and the middle were awful. Ansam is a young Iraqi dentist with a soft voice and a bright smile. Until September 2007 she was living in Cairo with her mother, her two brothers, and their families, all having fled to Cairo from the war in Iraq. Unable to find work as a dentist in Egypt because she was denied a work permit, Ansam decided to visit her brother in the US, where he has been an American citizen for thirty years. In September 2008 she got a visitor’s visa from the US Embassy in Cairo and flew to Houston, where her brother’s friends urged her to apply for asylum. Ansam’s application for asylum was quickly accepted. “The officer said to me, ‘You will be the best dentist in the US,’ she smiles. Armed with her new social security card, she started looking for a job.
But shortly after, Ansam collapsed in a coma and was rushed to a Houston hospital. Diagnosis: acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, an illness which can follow a viral, bacterial, or parasitic infection, or even a vaccination. Six days later, Ansam woke up with paralyzed limbs and no memory. She spent two months in rehab. Ansam is very close to her mother who is still in Cairo. Ansam’s doctors told her brother that to fully recover, Ansam she needed a mother’s care, 24 hours a day. So Ansam’s mother applied for a temporary visitor’s visa from the American Embassy in Cairo to come to Houston.
But officials at the US Embassy turned her down. They wouldn’t look at the invitation letter submitted by Ansam’s brother, the US citizen, or at the letters from Ansam’s doctors testifying to Ansam’s need for her mother’s care. Desperate to get Ansam well, Ansam’s brother applied to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for an urgent temporary travel permit to Egypt, since asylum status doesn’t provide for an American passport.
But the DHS didn’t answer. Two weeks passed and Ansam got worse. So following her doctor’s urging, Ansam’s brother bought two plane tickets to Cairo, put his sister in a wheelchair, and drove to the airport. But, to their shock, as they went through passport control, a US official confiscated Ansam’s I-94 Refugee Asylum Card.
Six months passed in Cairo. Under her mother’s care, Ansam became healthy and ready to work in a dentist’s office in the US. But she couldn’t buy a plane ticket to Houston because she lacked papers to re-enter the US. And the Egyptian staff at the US Embassy wouldn’t give her an appointment to see an American embassy official on the matter. So, following advice from other Iraqi refugees in Cairo, Ansam and her mother came to the office of Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond who has been helping Iraqi refugees in Egypt. Dr. Harrell-Bond was Founder/Director of the Refugee Studies Centre in Oxford until 1996, and was Distinguished Adjunct Professor in Refugee Studies at the American University of Cairo for the last eight and a half years until her retirement back to Oxford.
Why Ansam and her family left Iraq is typical of Iraqi refugees. Ansam wears bright western clothing with no scarf or veil. She was a dentist at an Iraqi government health center near a US army base near Baghdad. American soldiers donated medicines and supplies to her centre and when bombs exploded nearby, American soldiers quickly arrived to fix the crumbling building. Because Ansam speaks perfect English, she worked half time as a translator and half as a dentist.
One morning, Ansam’s co-workers handed her a letter that had been pushed under the clinic door. It was from a militia. “The letter said they would kill me when I left the health center. Why? Because I was a Shi’a working in a Sunni area and they also considered me a traitor because I talked to U.S. Army soldiers. They follow American soldiers and try to kill them.” Ansam hurried home. Her colleagues didn’t think the letter was meant for them so they kept the clinic open. At 2:00 the militia attacked and a dentist and a doctor died.
Ansam’s mother told her never again to work there. “I stayed at home for three days, but I wanted to do my job,” remembers Ansam. “So I drove my car to the Ministry of Health to tell them I wanted to change my place of work. I hadn’t been there for three years. It had changed. In the reception I saw an old woman wearing only black from head to floor, with a veil and black gloves. She told me go upstairs to Hassan. Upstairs, I saw only men wearing black clothes. These are the followers of the Mahdi Army who is loyal to radical cleric Moktada Al-Sadr who controls the Iraqi Ministry of Health . On the wall were posters about Moktada al-Sadr. I knocked on the door of Hassan’s office. He opened it and looked at me. I was wearing western clothes with no scarf or veil. I told him I want to change my work place. He said, ‘We will never do anything for a woman like you. Look in the mirror. You know why. Go, leave.’” Ansam cried as she walked to her car in the parking lot. “Then I saw three gunmen men around my car. One of them was wearing military police uniform and the other two were wearing civilian black clothes as in the Mahdi army. I put my key in the car door but one of them pushed me away. He said, ‘Why are you here? Do you know anyone here?’ I told him, ‘I am a dentist. I came to change my workplace.’ He said, ‘Are you Sunni or Shi’a?’ I told him Shi’a. He said, ‘Show me your card.’
“I opened my handbag. Inside was about $150. He took the money and the card. He said, ‘It’s a shame you are Shi’a. God told us to kill you. For your clothes, your hair. We won’t kill you now. But we will instruct you. We will follow you everywhere. Never come to the Ministry of Health again. Don’t imagine that we will leave you or even your bad mother who allowed her daughter to go out with such hair.’
“He put his gun against my throat and said, ‘We are going to kill you if we see you without a veil or a long gown.’ The other one took out his gun and shot my car. He said, ‘This is a sign that we are going to kill you when you try to drive anywhere. Go. Leave.’ I left but I was very afraid. I was sure they would follow me to see where I live.”
When Ansam got home, her mother told her never to leave the house. Her mother feared also for her two sons in Iraq, one who was then working with the Americans in the Police Academy, and a second who owned a small supermarket in Baghdad. She was also afraid for herself, because she is the mother of an American citizen.
“My brother who worked with the Americans at the Police Academy got a threatening letter and a person at his work project told him that his name was on a list of people the militia are going to kill. About twenty days later, he was driving home and bullets were shot into his car from behind. He left Iraq for Egypt. My other brother went to his small supermarket one day and found that everything had been stolen. The thieves had left a note, ‘Leave this area. You are a Jew.’” He left for Egypt.
Only Ansam’s sister remains in Iraq.
“After my brothers left Iraq, my mother and I thought they would not kill us. We are women and my mother is Sunni.” But they woke up one morning to find the electricity had been shut off. “My mother went outside to start the generator and she found a threatening letter with bullets on it. The letter said, ‘In 24 hours we will kill you.’”
Ansam’s mother fled immediately to Syria but Ansam stayed a week with her sister. Then she obtained a visa to Egypt and caught a ride to Syria with an Iraqi family. From Syria she and her mother flew to Egypt to join her brother.
After Ansam left, rockets blew up her home. Her neighbours sent her a photo via mobile telephone. “We lost everything,” she says. “But we thanked God we are still alive.” Then came the trip to Houston, the illness, and the emergency trip back to Cairo.
‘Don’t give up,’ is Ansam’s motto, which is also the belief of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children (www.womenscommision.org). An attorney at the Women’s Commission heard about her case, located a pro bono lawyer in New York, and by August, Amsam was speaking to him on the phone and emailing him her documents. By September, her DHS travel documents had arrived at the US Embassy in Cairo and her lawyer was on the phone asking when she could pick them up and buy her ticket to Houston. Now Ansam is back in Houston, setting up her own apartment and happily awaiting the forthcoming arrival of her mother and second brother. And every day she applies for another a job and works toward getting her certificate to practice dentistry in the US.
