Many Detroit Iraqi Refugees are Victims of Torture

Refugees are people who cannot return home…people whose own government cannot or will not protect them. They are people who are persecuted for religious or political beliefs…who flee war or genocide or are brutalized by a military regime. In the past seven years… Metro Detroit has become one of the largest resettlement points for Iraqi refugees in the United States. Dozens of families arrive weekly.

Najla Yacoub is a member of this community. Her family in Iraq was harassed and threatened so often they fled their homeland and went to Lebanon to avoid persecution. Today… after months of waiting for permission to come to the U-S.…her family is finally arriving. In the brightly lit terminal at Detroit Metro Airport Yacoub paces nervously. She checks the monitors to see when the flight, which is already hours late, will arrive.

Yacoub says she’s nervous but excited …she hasn’t seen her nephew in years and looks forward to see her family in his face. When the plane finally lands…a joyous Yacoub runs to meet her nephew and his wife.

The long plane ride from the Middle East is apparent. The recently arrived refugees look tired. Yacoub says she wants the first week for her family to be joyous…she’s planned a traditional Iraqi dinner, arranged visits with members of the Chaldean community and then… on Sunday… they will go to church.

On the corner of 13 mile and Dequindre is the Arab Alliance Christian Church. The building is plain, non-descript…yet the church is full. On this particular Sunday several people are getting baptized. The place of worship has become home to hundreds of members of the Iraqi refugee community. Here families gather and do what they say they are no longer been able to do peacefully in their homeland… worship Jesus Christ.

Sitting in the back of the church praying is a former Iraqi journalist. For the purposes of this interview we’ll call him Ibrahim…he doesn’t want his real name used because he fears retaliation against his family in Iraq.

In 2004… Ibrahim says he was outside of a mosque covering a story in Iraq when three men overpowered him. For five days he was blind folded, beaten and tortured. He says the kidnappers captured him because he is Christian and they believed he was working with American and British forces leaking them information.

The beatings lasted five days, which he says felt like five years. They told him if he didn’t stop reporting they would kill his wife and only daughter. One month after being set free he left his homeland. Ibrahim received refugee status through the United Nations and has now resettled in Mt. Clemens. He says wants to forget about his kidnapping and torture. They don’t want to talk about it they don’t want to think about it.

That’s Haitham Safo… a mental health therapist at ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic & Social Services. He works at The Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Torture helping refugees and asylum seekers. Safo says within Iraqi culture… getting treated for mental health issues is considered shameful. “Many of them live in denial, many of them have the stigma…there is nothing wrong with me…I am not crazy, I’m not going to go there. So they are living their life… torturing themselves and suffering them and their loved ones without nobody to help them.” Safo understands the difficulty of overcoming abuse. He’s recovered from years of torture while in the Iraqi Army.

“I faced death many times…I face persecution from Iraqi officers..Bathists …Iraqi officers both for religious reasons and many other reasons. As an Iraqi I was imprisoned many times, I was beaten and humiliated and insulted. Slapping most of the time…this is the least I got. Once you are in jail or in prison…beatings and slapping and hitting and kicking…this is very normal…this is what you got.”

Now Safo’s life is about helping other refugees. The small community is overwhelmed with hundreds of patients who need counseling with everything from depression to trauma and anxiety. Safo says victims like Ibrahim from the Iraqi Christian Church don’t usually get help until they reach a severe point. There are thousands of re-settled refugees living in metro Detroit yet there are less than half a dozen mental health therapists who speak Arabic.

“The demand is huge…and it’s difficult for even me to work in this kind of trauma. Our case load is very high…we can’t focus in Individuals in the right way in dealing with this kind of thing. We’re trying our best to provide the best therapy…”

Ibrahim says he has no intention of getting mental health counseling. He would rather deal with what happened to him by staying busy, praying and going to church. Wayne State University has joined ACCESS, and The Chaldean Federation of America in helping displaced Iraqi’s. The university recently received a two- point-six-million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to investigate stress resiliency and post-traumatic stress disorder of Iraqi refugees.

I’m Martina Guzman WDET News.

The lives of Iraqi refugees have been impacted since the event of September 11th, how has your life changed?