January 28, 2005

The Front Line

A Front Line in the War On Terror

Iraqi immigrants are voting today. The security perimeter around the Nashville voting site for the Iraqi elections is rather large - essentially, half of the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, with the actual voting taking place in large tents in the center of a large parking lot. I have requested media-access permission (from but have no clue if it will be granted. I may swing back by at lunchtime and take a few more photos from outside the perimeter to give you a better idea of what it looks like.

Meanwhile, there's a must-read story in today's Tennessean about a local Kurdish immmigrant who views his ballot today as a "bullet" to avenge the deaths of 26 family members killed by Saddam Hussein's soldiers.

Ibrahim Abdullatif's family tree has many missing branches. ''I don't know where to begin counting,'' he said. His eyelids close for a moment as he thinks. When they reopen, the young Kurd stares ahead, his iridescent brown eyes focusing intently on a point in midair. The names of cousins, aunts, uncles, all members of his mother's family, scroll through his memory. There were 26, he said.

They are among the missing branches of his ancestry, a mass of young and old lives snuffed out on a terrible day of un-just reckoning in 1988 when Saddam Hussein's soldiers entered their town in northern Iraq - Kurdistan to the Kurdish - and shot to death dozens of people, including Abdullatif's kin.

"We were Kurds. Saddam hated us. These aren't uncommon stories among those from Kurdistan, Iraq, that's the sad thing," said Abdullatif, 26.

Abdullatif remembers the sound of bombs hitting villages downstream from their river camp in the mountains on another day in 1988. "They seemed closer this time. They were gassing the villages, but we had no way of knowing this," e said of the infamous chemical attacks ordered by Saddam. Thousands perished.

"So many lost so much."

That is why today, he and his mother, Sabrya, and his father, Sadigh, will extract a measure of vengeance for all the pain, despair, fear, tears and loss served to them during a 24-year period by the intolerant Saddam. Today, they will have their say in the voting booth.

The Abdullatifs are among 280,303 Iraqi expatriates in the United States who have registered to vote in Iraq's Transitional National Assembly election. ''It is wonderful, what is happening,'' Abdullatif said.

On Wednesday afternoon, two days before the polls open, he was seated on a couch in the family's Harding Place-area home, a tidy structure on a corner lot. Abdullatif enjoys afternoon tea with cookies and pistachio nuts. He has just been home only a few weeks, having been in Iraq working as a translator for the American military for nearly two years. He will return to northern Iraq in early February.

On the living room wall was a map of Kurdistan, that would-be "country" now annexed as part of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran. His father catnapped on an adjacent sofa, while his mother prayed in another room.

"She prays for George Bush," he said.