LSU graduate Basam Ridha Al-Husaini had to flee for his life, leaving his family behind and the country he calls home.
After the recent fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime he will finally be able to return to Iraq after 21 years.
Al-Husaini graduated from the University with a degree in engineering in 1987.
He now lives in Los Angeles and has an engineering job.
In May 1982 two of his brothers had been imprisoned by Hussein, and Al-Husaini decided to leave Iraq and come to the United States.
Fearing imprisonment by Hussein because he did not want to join the Ba’ath Party, a socialist secular Arab nationalist party established in 1947, Al-Husaini forged his documents, changed his name and fled to the United States, he said.
“I was escaping from my life,” he said. “I was going to be next.”
He left his mother and four sisters behind and has kept in contact with them once a month for the past 21 years.
Al-Husaini is part of the team hand-picked by the U.S. State Department to help rebuild Iraq as a part of the government’s outreach media program and the engineering department, he said.
Al-Husaini said he can hardly contain his excitement about returning to Iraq.
He wanted to return the week Hussein was ousted, but his family told him to wait because an acquaintance had gone back and was killed, he said.
With proper military security, Al-Husaini said he is planning on returning to Iraq next week.
He said most of the Iraqi people have been supportive of the war on Hussein, not on the people, and have been waiting for the moment when Hussein was finally removed from power.
“It was like a dream come true to see the statue of Saddam Hussein come down,” Al-Husaini said. “I was thinking, ‘This nightmare is gone.'”
He said in his culture, to beat someone with a shoe is to say, “I hate you with a passion,” so when the Iraqi people were beating the statue with their shoes, they were expressing their pure hatred for Hussein.
He said now the people will be able to express their feelings, to practice their religion and faith and to enjoy other freedoms inherent to every human being.
When people began to report genocide, mutilation and torture, not a single Arab leader said anything, he said.
Finally, the United States started talking about the atrocities, and Al-Husaini and many other Iraqi people started to show support for the Bush administration’s war on Hussein, he said.
He said he thinks the United States troops should stay but only as long as necessary to avoid a civil war because Iraq is in a state of chaos.
Once things have settled down, he said he thinks the troops will not be needed anymore.
Al-Husaini said even in watching the war from his home in California, he has not forgotten about his alma mater.
He said when officials found Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son, officials found tigers in his back yard.
“When I saw the tigers on the news,” he said, “I thought of LSU.”