"Will my family survive?" An Iraqi-American calls Baghdad once a week to find out...

[babylonsister]

"Will my family survive?" An Iraqi-American calls Baghdad once a week to find out if his loved ones are dead or alive
by Jaime O'Neill | Nov 10 2007

— first published in the Sacramento News & Review



Every Sunday morning, a man who lives in Davis, CA makes a phone call to Iraq, a call he makes with the gravest of trepidation. This end-of-the-week phone call has become a ritual, an homage to anxiety and dread. The man has many relatives in Iraq, his native land, and all of the other days of his week are clouded over with worries for the safety of kin back in the place he left so long ago. He phones home on Sundays to gather the news, to see how his relatives have fared, to see, in fact, if they've survived another seven days.

"My name is Fadhil Al-Kazily," he tells me, in measured tones. "I was born in Iraq in 1935. I'm an old man now. I lived in Iraq until I finished high school. I am an American by choice. I came here when things were good between my nation and this nation. Although my roots are in Iraq, my branches are in this country--my children, my grandchildren, my citizenship. The feeling I have sometimes is that my roots are being destroyed by my branches. I remember every bit of my childhood, and I feel those roots being destroyed by the part of me that has branched off in this nation."

He pauses, thinks, begins again.

"Baghdad was a very nice place when I was young, in many ways similar to Sacramento. It has the two rivers--the Tigris and Euphrates--so there was a lot of greenery and many trees. There was a plentiful water supply, and palm trees all over the place. Now it's a horror show. Now it looks like a war zone. Not even a third of the streets are useable, and Iraqis can't drive on them, anyway. Going out in a car is an invitation to die."

Al-Kazily moved to this country in 1964, along with his wife, "a lovely young Englishwoman," to use his own descriptive phrase. They met and married while he was doing undergraduate work in Liverpool. After that, he got a job with Bechtel in the Bay Area and then returned to graduate work at UC Berkeley, gaining a doctorate in engineering. He's been married for 49 years, and the couple has two grown children. He currently teaches engineering at Sac State.

"I also still have a very large family in Iraq," he says. "I have seven brothers and one sister, and all are in Iraq except one, so I keep in touch with them every Sunday. Every Sunday morning is devoted to catching up on news from my brothers and my sister, and their children."

The war in Iraq, as it is in the majority of American households, is unpopular in the Al-Kazily home. But unlike many Iraqi-Americans who lay low for their own safety, Al-Kazily has gone public with his dissent.

Very public.

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[NI4NI]

1. and I bet every call he makes is wiretapped n/t