Iraqi Refugee Family 021010

Publication: Syracuse New Times
Author: Griffin-Nolan, Ed
Date published: February 10, 2010

Muna Tadros' long journey to Syracuse began on a flight from Amman, Jordan, to Germany. From there she and her two children boarded a plane to Miami, transferred to another plane to Chicago, and then made it to Syracuse, arriving last April. On each leg of the trip she was accompanied by her children, a doctor assigned to her by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and a great sadness caused by the realization that she might never see her husband again.

Tadros, an Iraqi native now living in the Hawley-Green neighborhood, had been living in near exile in Jordan since 1994. She and her husband Ahmed left their home country after she fell out of favor with the government of Saddam Hussein.

Tadros once held a clerical position in an Iraqi government office. When she quit her job, though, she found herself caught in a Hotel California type of situation: You may be able to check out from the government, but you can never leave. Barred from leaving Iraq legally, a stranger provided Tadros an exit visa sealed in an envelope.

With those papers she crossed from Iraq to neighboring Jordan where she set up a life with her husband and their first child, Omar. In Jordan she worked as a studio photographer doing portraits and an event photographer snapping images at weddings and corporate meetings. Her husband made a living as a mechanic. Their daughter Samar, now 13 and a student at H.W. Smith School, was born in Amman in 1996.

After Ahmed returned to Baghdad in 2004 to assist his ailing parents, he lost his legal status in Jordan. Between 2005 and 2007, Muna and the children visited him regularly. "The trip was very dangerous, but we trusted that God would take care of us, and the children needed to see their father. Ahmed could not get out of Iraq, and Jordan wouldn't take him back."

The country was unrecognizable from the one they had left in the mid-1990s. Samar tells the story of riding on a Baghdad street when men with machine guns and their faces covered stopped the car in front of them. "It was so ugly," she said while sitting on a sofa in the apartment. "They shot him, and took his car, and they told everyone that whoever comes to claim his body will also get killed. For three days his body lay there in the street."

On their final visit in 2007 a Shiite militia took over their bus. Eight men were ordered off the bus-they were later found executed. Further up the road, a second group of gunmen forced Omar, then 16, to go with them. Now 19, Omar is a senior at Nottingham High School.

Even today his mother cries as she speaks of the terror of having him dragged from her arms, screaming at the intruders to take her too. "I had to touch him and say a prayer for him, and talk to the men with guns to try to save my son's life." For hours that seemed like days the gunmen held him out of her sight. When he was released, they resumed their journey, but she knew they would never set foot in Iraq again. In her dark eyes you can see the sadness she harbors at the divisions that have overtaken her native land. "When I got back to Jordan I asked myself-what has happened to the Iraqi people? We have a good heart, but something has happened to us.

"Before all this there was no Sunni or Shiite, we were all Iraqis. Now, even when the armies leave, it will be Iraqis killing Iraqis." She blames neighboring Iran for much of the country's problems. The Islamic republic's growing influence has divided neighbors and families. "Are you with Sadr or Zarqawi?" demanded the men who took her son, referring to rival Iraqi militia leaders. "How can he even know of such things? I told them, 'He is just a boy. We don't even live in Iraq anymore. We don't follow anything.'"

In early 2007 word came that Ahmed had left his brother's house in Baghdad to visit his mother. He never arrived. In the climate of the times, the family feared the worst. For nearly three years they had no word from him. Stress took a heavy toll on Muna's health.

"My health was very bad," she said. "I went to many doctors. I can remember waking up to see my children praying over me. They said I may have depression. Finally a Jordanian doctor said I may have adrenal problems."

During surgery in Jordan, her heart stopped. Doctors revived her, but their efforts left her with several broken ribs and other complications. The surgery was never completed, and doctors advised her to seek treatment in the United States.

Once the family made it to Syracuse, Catholic Charities helped settle them into their apartment. Muna's health problems continued and she was hospitalized at St. Joseph's on three separate occasions. There she befriended a physician assistant, Kara Timmons, who has helped the family and become close friends with all three of them. Friends from a Syracuse support group, Women Transcending Boundaries, helped take care of the children during her first hospitalization, bringing them to visit her and taking them in.

One evening, Samar was at home when the phone rang. She heard a man's voice on the other end of the line saying her name. "I was like, 'Hello,' and then I was like, 'Who are you?' and he was like, 'I'm your father.'" Samar, now a bright-eyed young teen in blue jeans, is a high honor roll student who dreams of becoming a pediatrician.

"I didn't know what to do," said Samar, "so I was like, 'Omar, there's this guy on the phone saying he's our dad.'" Omar took the phone. "He was like, 'What is my mother's name? What is my grandmother's name? What does our house look like?' All sorts of questions like that." Finally satisfied that the man was in fact their father, they gave him the number in the hospital.

"When he first called, I was like in a dream," said Muna. "I couldn't believe it." As it turned out, Ahmed had stepped out of his sister's house to find an envelope with three bullets. He knew the meaning of it: His friend had received such a note and been executed the following day. With the help of his employer, Ahmed fled north to the Kurdish area of Iraq. He let time pass, and worked his way back to Baghdad and eventually secured passage to Syria, where by chance he ran into Muna's sister in Damascus. She gave him the phone number of the apartment on Green Street, and the families' dream of being reunited reawakened.

The family has been working with friends to try to bring Ahmed here from Turkey, where he now lives. Through the office of Rep. Dan Maffei, they have secured a visa for him, and are hoping that he will be able to join them. "Within two months," said Samar, "I hope to see my father again." She holds a photo of him in a snowstorm in Amman. "I've seen him on the Internet," she noted. "He has more white hair. He looks a little older now."

Ahmed's 50th birthday is in late March, and the family hopes they can celebrate this milestone together. "Inshallah," said Muna. "If it be the will of God." She smiles a smile that makes her seem 10 years younger. "We have had so many problems, but now when I think of him coming back to us, I have hope."

-ED GRIFFIN-NOLAN

Terry Anderson News Story 111601

Terry Anderson talks about the media, living in Central New York and his time as a hostage in Lebanon

By Ed Griffin-Nolan

SYRACUSE NEW TIMES | NOVEMBER 16, 2011

You don’t think much about retirement when you’re a Marine in Vietnam. You don’t think much about retirement when you’re a hard-charging, hard-drinking international correspondent in Africa and Asia. And when you’re blindfolded and bumping along in the trunk of a car driven by Hezbollah through the streets of wartime Beirut, as Terry Anderson was on multiple occasions a few decades back, you most certainly do not contemplate retirement.

But as The Byrds so eloquently put it when they did their cover of one of scripture’s greatest hits, for everything there is a season, and this autumn finds Terry Anderson back in upstate New York, scouting the landscape for a place, of all things, to retire.

The paunchy and bespectacled Anderson, who just turned 64, has signed on for a yearlong gig as a visiting professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, teaching international journalism and critical perspectives in the media to mostly graduate students at Syracuse University. He is bullish on Central New York, and on SU. “This is a great school,” he gushes. “The toys these kids get to play with are unbelievable!”

Anderson was kidnapped in his tennis shorts on March 16, 1985, by Islamic Jihad, a cell of the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, which has longstanding ties to the Iranian government. His nearly seven-year imprisonment connected him directly or tangentially with many of the major issues of late 20th-century global history, from the end of the Cold War to the modern age of terrorism. When Ronald Reagan’s aide, a Marine colonel named Oliver North, tried to secure the release of Anderson and fellow hostages by persuading the Iranians to arm the Nicaraguan Contras, the resulting scandal nearly brought down the administration and led to the conviction of several high-ranking officials of Reagan and George W. Bush.

Next month it will be exactly 20 years since Anderson was released, driven to Damascus, Syria, to be reunited with his wife Madeleine and Sulome, the 6½-year-old daughter he had never met. The road from hostage to Newhouse professor has taken as many turns as the cars that transported him blindfolded through the Lebanese night from one hiding place to the next.

He is now as big an Orange booster as Otto himself. “I think Syracuse is a nice city, with a vital culture,” says Anderson, perched at his fourth-floor desk in the futuristic Newhouse III, the setting sun casting an amber haze over the older castles of academe perched on the hill above. “I love the diversity. You’ve got a lot of great theater, great restaurants.” Taking a glass-half-full approach to the bankruptcy of the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, he gushes, “I love the fact that they are trying to revive the symphony.”

His only complaint about the “very bright” students that he teaches is that they don’t seem to get off campus enough to appreciate all the city offers. He exudes an optimism about our town that a lot of locals can’t seem to muster.

From Newsman to Newhouse

Few of the students in his classes at Newhouse (fully a third of them are from outside the United States) were even born when Anderson was kidnapped after that fateful tennis match in Beirut. A former Marine and Vietnam veteran, Anderson had followed wars and famines across Africa for six years before the Associated Press sent him to Lebanon to cover that country’s civil war. At the time of his capture he was the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent.

For now life finds him nestled in a cottage on the shores of Otisco Lake, where he recently landed a 34-inch Tiger Muskie (for the uninitiated, that is a big fish to land from a very stingy lake). “I intend to retire in upstate New York,” he says. Anderson was born in Ohio but grew up in Batavia, where a bust of him now graces the high school from which he graduated. Mixing political commentary with travelogue, he notes, “This is a beautiful, interesting state which has been very badly led for a very long time.”

Thus the headline might read: “Man who lived imprisoned under constant death threat in Beirut likes Syracuse better” except that Anderson also really loves Beirut. He has gone back to his old Lebanese stomping grounds several times with students from Ohio State and the University of Kentucky, where he taught before coming here in August. He went back to Lebanon in 1996 with a CNN crew and made a film in which, among other things, he met the mastermind of his kidnapping, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, whom Anderson says he has long since forgiven. (He also has forgiven his fellow Marine Oliver North, whose antics, Anderson believes, added years to his imprisonment.)

How has Lebanon changed? “For one thing, they’re not killing each other in large numbers,” he says, noting the obvious.

In the years following his release, Anderson says he was all over the country “trying to find my way.” Known as a hard-drinking, risk-taking reporter prior to his kidnapping, during his captivity he turned to religion and poetry to keep himself together. He recounted much of that story in Den of Lions (Crown, 1993), a memoir he wrote in tandem with Madeleine.

His daughter, who was born during his captivity, works today as a reporter with The Daily Star, an English-language paper in Lebanon. “I have the distinction of having both of my daughters evacuated from Beirut by the U.S. Navy under fire,” he says with a chuckle. BOTH?

Anderson is harshly critical of his colleagues in the press in allowing the 2003 invasion of Iraq to roll unchallenged. “Anyone who knew anything about Iraq knew that Saddam had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. Iraq wasn’t even a Muslim country,” he says. “It was a socialist country. We had already destroyed Saddam’s army in the first Gulf War. That was like sending the Dallas Cowboys against a high school team.

“We didn’t cover ourselves with any kind of glory. The war was covered nearly 100 percent by reporters embedded with the U.S. military. Before the war we gave very short shrift to what the UN inspectors on the ground were saying. Judith Miller in The New York Times kept reporting from Iraq that they were about to build weapons of mass destruction. None of it turned out to be true.”

He makes no effort to hide his disdain for broadcast news. “Local TV is the worst part of journalism today.”

In spite of its failings, Anderson believes that the journalism has a bright future. He refers to himself an “old, dead-tree guy,” by which he means a journalist who uses only words to convey his message. He considers himself a relic, referring to himself at one point as “a grumpy old guy from another century,” but insists that his profession is in fine shape.

“The myth that journalism jobs are going away is bullshit,” he insists. “People like me, old dead-tree guys who haven’t made the transition to digital, we’re the ones who are going away. At The New York Times there are as many jobs as always--they’re just different jobs.

“My daughter went to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and now she works in Lebanon for The Daily Star. She learned that to be successful today you have to be able to work in at least three platforms. For God’s sake, The Wall Street Journal is now running four hours a day of live TV on the web. They’re not a newspaper anymore; they’re a damned television station!”

A lifelong Democrat, Anderson looks forward to volunteering next year on Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. At one point Anderson himself was a candidate for public office. It was 2004, and he lost a race for state Senate in Ohio. “Like a good Democrat I ran on jobs, education and health care, and my opponent ran on God, guns and gays. The New York Times said it was the dirtiest race in America that year. I got my clock cleaned, and afterward I concluded that the people were correct not to vote for me. They went to the polls to select someone who reflects their views, and I did not.”

What persuaded him to go into politics? “Madness!” he insists. “I was playing poker with some friends from the Democratic Committee and they were looking for a candidate. They said ‘How about it?’ and I figured I’d been telling politicians how to do things for a long time, so I said why not?”

That sort of reckless decision-making has played a big role in Anderson’s life, which includes a pair of failed marriages (“I’m not very good at relationships,” he volunteers), foreclosure on a horse ranch in Ohio and a bankruptcy filing two years ago. That last came after his 2002 multimillion settlement in federal court against the government of Iran, the principal financial and military backer of Hezbollah.

Anderson received the settlement, worth as much as $26 million by some estimates (Sulome and Madeleine were awarded separate multimillion dollar verdicts), from frozen Iranian funds held in American banks after a two-day trial and an extensive lobbying campaign that defied the wishes of the Clinton administration, which at the time was holding out hope for better relations with Teheran.

Anderson started a number of charitable ventures, including an organization that built schools in Vietnam, and a number of businesses, an IT firm that went belly up and a chain of restaurants. Still, you have to wonder: How do you end up bankrupt after tasting that kind of money?

“I wasn’t very good at being a rich man,” he answers. “Stupidity, a bad market. I trusted people. I grew up poor and didn’t know anything about money. I gave half of it away.”

Today he sounds like a man who wants to leave that all behind him, spending his time fishing at Otisco or preparing for a trip to the Caribbean, where, even with two artificial knees, he indulges his passion for scuba diving.

For all his many lives--horse rancher, restaurateur, philanthropist, professor, political candidate--Anderson remains convinced, with good reason, that his obituary will peg him first and foremost as “former hostage.”

He’d most like to be remembered as a passionate journalist who is passionate about journalism. He has served for 20 years with the Committee to Protect Journalists, which advocates for practitioners of a free press worldwide. “Eight hundred journalists have been killed in the past 20 years all over the world, and in the majority of those cases, there has been no investigation, no trial, no justice.”

Passion and objectivity, he insists, are not mutually exclusive. “The job of a journalist is to go out and find the truth and tell the story as best you can. Objectivity means divorcing the telling of the story from your own worldview and preconceptions. It does not mean not caring! If you’re not passionate then don’t go into journalism. We have enough mediocre journalists.”