Gassed by Iraqi Troops, Blindsided by the INS Exile Lends Support to Bush, Then Finds Herself on Immigration's Deportation List
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 9, 2003; Page C01
On March 14, when President Bush was seeking international support for an invasion of Iraq, he summoned Iraqi exile Katrin Michael to a meeting in the Oval Office, where she recounted her horrific story of being gassed by Saddam Hussein's troops in 1987.
That day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher both used the meeting as an opportunity to issue statements attacking Hussein for his use of chemical weapons. And Michael told her story on National Public Radio and ABC-TV.
A week later -- on March 21, the day after the war began -- Michael received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service demanding that she report to a deportation officer.
"I was scared, I got crazy," says Michael, 53, who works as a translator for the Iraq Foundation in Washington. "I asked the deportation officer, 'You're going to deport me in this war situation?' And he said, 'No, you should be detained.' I said, 'I met President Bush last week and now I'll be in jail in America?' "
This morning, Michael is scheduled to meet with her deportation officer. "I'm going to take a picture of me with President Bush and show it to him," she says.
The White House declines to discuss Michael or the deportation action against her. A White House press officer referred inquiries to the National Security Council, which referred inquiries to the State Department, which referred inquiries to the Department of Homeland Security, where Greg Gagne, spokesman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, uttered this on-the-record comment:
"We don't discuss these things."
Michael's deportation problem is just the latest crisis in a life filled with turmoil and horror. She was born in 1950 in northern Iraq, a member of the Assyrian Christian minority in that predominantly Muslim nation. During her childhood, she says, her father, an oil company auditor, was jailed several times for his political activities in support of equal rights for Christians. At 14 she, too, was briefly jailed, she says, accused of smuggling food and information to her father, who was in hiding.
In the early '70s she studied geology at Mosul University, where she acquired a reputation as an outspoken feminist.
"She was very active and very vocal," recalls Audisho Khoshaba, a Chicago doctor who met Michael when they were both students at Mosul. "She was harassed by the Baath regime. They tried to intimidate her."
In 1976, Michael won a scholarship to study geology and petroleum engineering in Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union. By the time she returned to Iraq with a PhD in geology in 1982, Hussein had seized power, her father had died after another brutal stint in prison, and two of her brothers had joined the Peshmerga, the Kurdish guerrillas fighting Hussein's army. She, too, joined the Peshmerga, she says, organizing support among women in Kurdistan.
Sitting in her small Arlington apartment, she pulls out a photo album filled with snapshots from her guerrilla days. In one picture, she stands on a rocky mountainside, holding a rifle. In another, she's smiling broadly, cuddling a friend's son, a little boy named Sim-Sim, who was, she says, later injured in a gas attack by the Iraqi army.
She turns the page to a photo of guerrillas and points to a smiling young woman. "This is me," she says. She points to another guerrilla. "This is a friend of mine. He was killed."
She flips to another page, this one a photo of people sitting in a stone house. "This is me," she says. "This is my friend. Her brother was killed in a fight. We were having a ceremony for him, a funeral."
When she closes the album, her eyes are glossed with tears. "Through all my travels, I lost everything else, but I kept these photos," she says. "I feel this is my wealth."
All through the 1980s, while Iraq was at war with Iran, the Peshmerga guerrillas fought Hussein's army in the rugged mountains of Kurdistan. On June 5, 1987, the Iraqi army, which had already used poison gas against Iranian troops, dropped bombs containing mustard and cyanide gas on Kurdish guerrillas in the Zewa valley. Michael was there.
"Every day they were bombing us," she says. "This was not something strange. This was for us a usual day. But it was the first time they used chemical weapons."
She takes out a piece of paper and draws a rough map -- squiggly lines for two rows of mountains, a couple of straight lines for the stream that ran through the valley in between.
"Here is the stream and here are the Peshmerga sites and here are the civilian villages," she says. "It was a valley, so the poison gas didn't blow away. It stayed in the valley."
The bombs fell about 7:30 that night. At first, the guerrillas didn't know the bombs contained poison gas. There was an odd smell -- like rotten garlic, she says -- but they figured it was sulfur from the explosions. Then one guerrilla, her friend Rebar Ajeel, said he felt ill.
"He said, 'I took a lot of the sulfur,' and he vomited everything from his stomach and I took him some water and we put him on a blanket."
She stops, takes a deep breath, continues. "We didn't know it was chemical weapons. We just give him some water."
It was a summer night and the guerrillas slept outdoors on a terrace, she says, but she decided to sleep inside. She doesn't know why she did, but she figures now that it might have saved her life.
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 9, 2003; Page C01
On March 14, when President Bush was seeking international support for an invasion of Iraq, he summoned Iraqi exile Katrin Michael to a meeting in the Oval Office, where she recounted her horrific story of being gassed by Saddam Hussein's troops in 1987.
That day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and State Department spokesman Richard Boucher both used the meeting as an opportunity to issue statements attacking Hussein for his use of chemical weapons. And Michael told her story on National Public Radio and ABC-TV.
A week later -- on March 21, the day after the war began -- Michael received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service demanding that she report to a deportation officer.
"I was scared, I got crazy," says Michael, 53, who works as a translator for the Iraq Foundation in Washington. "I asked the deportation officer, 'You're going to deport me in this war situation?' And he said, 'No, you should be detained.' I said, 'I met President Bush last week and now I'll be in jail in America?' "
This morning, Michael is scheduled to meet with her deportation officer. "I'm going to take a picture of me with President Bush and show it to him," she says.
The White House declines to discuss Michael or the deportation action against her. A White House press officer referred inquiries to the National Security Council, which referred inquiries to the State Department, which referred inquiries to the Department of Homeland Security, where Greg Gagne, spokesman for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, uttered this on-the-record comment:
"We don't discuss these things."
Michael's deportation problem is just the latest crisis in a life filled with turmoil and horror. She was born in 1950 in northern Iraq, a member of the Assyrian Christian minority in that predominantly Muslim nation. During her childhood, she says, her father, an oil company auditor, was jailed several times for his political activities in support of equal rights for Christians. At 14 she, too, was briefly jailed, she says, accused of smuggling food and information to her father, who was in hiding.
In the early '70s she studied geology at Mosul University, where she acquired a reputation as an outspoken feminist.
"She was very active and very vocal," recalls Audisho Khoshaba, a Chicago doctor who met Michael when they were both students at Mosul. "She was harassed by the Baath regime. They tried to intimidate her."
In 1976, Michael won a scholarship to study geology and petroleum engineering in Azerbaijan, then part of the Soviet Union. By the time she returned to Iraq with a PhD in geology in 1982, Hussein had seized power, her father had died after another brutal stint in prison, and two of her brothers had joined the Peshmerga, the Kurdish guerrillas fighting Hussein's army. She, too, joined the Peshmerga, she says, organizing support among women in Kurdistan.
Sitting in her small Arlington apartment, she pulls out a photo album filled with snapshots from her guerrilla days. In one picture, she stands on a rocky mountainside, holding a rifle. In another, she's smiling broadly, cuddling a friend's son, a little boy named Sim-Sim, who was, she says, later injured in a gas attack by the Iraqi army.
She turns the page to a photo of guerrillas and points to a smiling young woman. "This is me," she says. She points to another guerrilla. "This is a friend of mine. He was killed."
She flips to another page, this one a photo of people sitting in a stone house. "This is me," she says. "This is my friend. Her brother was killed in a fight. We were having a ceremony for him, a funeral."
When she closes the album, her eyes are glossed with tears. "Through all my travels, I lost everything else, but I kept these photos," she says. "I feel this is my wealth."
All through the 1980s, while Iraq was at war with Iran, the Peshmerga guerrillas fought Hussein's army in the rugged mountains of Kurdistan. On June 5, 1987, the Iraqi army, which had already used poison gas against Iranian troops, dropped bombs containing mustard and cyanide gas on Kurdish guerrillas in the Zewa valley. Michael was there.
"Every day they were bombing us," she says. "This was not something strange. This was for us a usual day. But it was the first time they used chemical weapons."
She takes out a piece of paper and draws a rough map -- squiggly lines for two rows of mountains, a couple of straight lines for the stream that ran through the valley in between.
"Here is the stream and here are the Peshmerga sites and here are the civilian villages," she says. "It was a valley, so the poison gas didn't blow away. It stayed in the valley."
The bombs fell about 7:30 that night. At first, the guerrillas didn't know the bombs contained poison gas. There was an odd smell -- like rotten garlic, she says -- but they figured it was sulfur from the explosions. Then one guerrilla, her friend Rebar Ajeel, said he felt ill.
"He said, 'I took a lot of the sulfur,' and he vomited everything from his stomach and I took him some water and we put him on a blanket."
She stops, takes a deep breath, continues. "We didn't know it was chemical weapons. We just give him some water."
It was a summer night and the guerrillas slept outdoors on a terrace, she says, but she decided to sleep inside. She doesn't know why she did, but she figures now that it might have saved her life.