Escaping a Painful Past to Find a Shaky Future

[MountainLaurel]

Victim of Saddam's torture chambers facing uncertainty in and deportation from the U.S.

Hussein Hayal al Zaidi says he spent nearly four years in jail in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, once in a 13-by-13-foot cell with 20 other men. His captors blindfolded him and pummeled his eyes, detaching one of his retinas. He has scars on his ankles, feet and hands from where they strung him up with ropes and beat him. His genitalia bear the marks of electric shock burns.

He was sentenced to death in 1999 for participating in an anti-Hussein riot, al Zaidi said. An uncle paid $7,000 to smuggle him out of jail and out of Iraq. He was flown from Syria to Moscow to Cuba to Ecuador before arriving at an airport in Newark, disoriented and ill. He asked for asylum.

An immigration officer in Newark believed his story and let him stay. But an immigration judge in Arlington County, who heard final arguments on his case 10 days after Sept. 11, 2001, did not believe him.

She ordered him deported.

But, like 165 others, the Northern Virginia man cannot be deported. Since the war in Iraq began in 2003, the United States has followed a United Nations directive not to forcibly return Iraqis to their country because it is too dangerous.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/06/AR2007030602334.html