And with good right they should be

Boy's death leads Iraqi family to N.D.

GRAND FORKS (AP) - With a glance at the boy smiling from a framed photograph, Haifa Hasan explains why her family left Iraq for Grand Forks.

"My son was killed."

Murtada was 12, a handsome and cheerful youth of Baghdad. He loved soccer and swimming and yearned to drive a car.

"He is not tall," his mother said, smiling through tears, holding a hand at a remembered height, still speaking of her middle son in the present tense.

One day, she said, before Murtada was kidnapped, he was allowed to drive near his home. As he cautiously made small circles, straining to see over the steering wheel, passing U.S. soldiers stopped to watch.

"The soldiers ..." Not finding the English word, Haifa began clapping.

They applauded?

"Yes!" she said, happy and proud still. "The soldiers applauded my son driving."

Haifa and her husband, Hasan Sahar, arrived in Grand Forks last week with sons Mostafa, 16, and Jafar, 11. The family had waited two years in Jordan before settling here with help from Lutheran Social Services.

Their new neighbors in the apartment complex off DeMers Avenue are refugees from Burundi, Somalia and other countries, and the boys sometimes join young Africans for parking-lot soccer.

"On the plane, I saw only desert," Haifa said, her eyes widening as she recalled her first glimpse of farmland, buff-colored after harvest.

"But this city is beauty," she said. "It is quiet. The people here have been very kind to us. We were surprised that many Americans and Iraqis met us at the airport. We were happy.

"And we felt safe."

Hasan Sahar, 40, taught Spanish at Baghdad University. Haifa Hasan, 38, studied English there. Despite the war, they had a good life, but that all changed on May 15, 2006.

"In the morning, my son went to his school," Haifa said. "The bus did not come that day, so he walked. It was not far. He had done it before.

"But this day, he did not come back."

Haifa told her husband, who went looking for the boy. Not finding him, he went to the police.

"They told us to go home," Haifa said. "They told us, 'When we find him, we'll bring him home.' But they didn't do anything."

From the moment she realized that Murtada was late, "I knew my son had been kidnapped," she said.

The next day, a man called to demand a ransom. Haifa answered, but the caller wouldn't talk with her; he asked to speak with the boy's father. Hasan was out searching for his son, so Haifa handed the phone to her husband's brother.

"They told him, 'If you don't give ransom, we kill him and you can't see him again.'" The caller demanded $50,000.

"I want to know why," Haifa said last week, crying. Her husband, sitting at her side and listening intently, trying to follow with his more limited English, also began to cry, hearing his dead son's name and knowing too well the story his wife was telling.

"Why they kidnapped him?" she demanded. "Why they kidnapped this child?"

The family had nothing close to $50,000, but they sold everything - house, car, furniture, jewelry and a shop where Hasan made extra money selling pickles. They borrowed from relatives.

By the next day, two days after Murtada was taken, they had $15,000.

"They told us to put it in a black nylon bag" and deliver it to a basket outside a house not far from theirs. "They said, 'We see you and your house. Only Hasan take the money, walk to this spot and no one come with him.' They told us after four hours we would see our son."

The money was delivered. The hours passed.

Two nephews, checking the morgue at a nearby hospital, found Murtada's body. He had been beaten, and cigarette burns covered his face.

"I heard crying in the street," Haifa said. "I went out, and every neighbor is crying, and I know."

Her brother, a doctor, went to the hospital to identify the body. He learned that Murtada had been killed the day he was taken; he was dead when the kidnappers negotiated a ransom.

Many members of the extended family, afraid for their own children, decided to flee Iraq. After observing the traditional 40 days of mourning for Murtada, Haifa and Hasan gathered their two remaining sons and left for Jordan.

Riding in a taxi, they had reached the city of Ramadi, capital of Al-Anbar province in central Iraq and controlled then by insurgents, when their car was stopped.

The insurgents took Hasan from the car, despite his wife's pleas.

"I told them, 'If you kill him, you kill me. My son is 40 days cold, and now you take my husband?'"

Through his wife, Hasan told of being taken to a small building with a man named Ali, abducted from another taxi at the same time.

Hasan dropped to his knees on the carpet of his new apartment and put his hands behind his back to show what the abductors told him and Ali to do. Then, rising, he showed how they pulled him away and forced him to watch as they shot Ali in the neck. He said one gunman then stood close to him and put the pistol to his head.

Haifa said she went to an elder of her extended family, an important man in Ramadi, and told him what had happened. He made inquiries, learned who was holding Hasan and sent a message.

"They released him," Haifa said.

The traumatized family returned to Baghdad. Three days later, they again left for Jordan - this time by plane.

"In Jordan, it was a difficult life," Haifa said. "We had no money left, and we were not allowed to work."

Every week, Hasan went to an office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He also met with the International Organization of Migration, a multinational agency that promotes humane and orderly migration of displaced people.

They and U.S. agencies were persuaded that the family should be allowed into the United States. They arrived in Grand Forks on Oct. 30.

"The only good thing about Jordan was that my family was safe, but still I would not let the boys go out on the street," Haifa said. "Here, I let them go out and play. We walk to the convenience store. We go to the library."

They are waiting for Social Security numbers, and then their need will be for work, preferably work that fits their education and experience. Along with Spanish and pickles, Hasan knows heating and cooling equipment.

"I would like to teach," Haifa said, smiling. "I love to teach."

She hopes to see Iraq again. Conditions have improved, she said, citing information gleaned from the Internet and reports from relatives still in Baghdad. There will be peace someday, "but far away," she said.