Two weeks before Baghdad fell to U.S. Forces on April 9, 2003, Sari Khalil (COL ‘10) heard the American troops arriving. His house was on the western side of the city, smack in the middle of three Iraqi National Guard camps. One of them, Um-Almaank—just four miles from his house—contained not only a camp but also a mosque.
“We could hear the sound of the bombs coming closer, until it was our turn,” Khalil said. “[Um-Almaank] was so heavily bombed [the first] night, that we all knew we were going to die that day. You would hear the aircrafts coming real close; they were so close and so low that you could hear the sound of the missile leaving the plane … and then you would see this quick flash … and within half a second you would hear this huge sound … the whole house was like, broken windows. It was really scary.”
Khalil, his three younger brothers and his parents did survive that night, the “lightest night of the seven nights,” and escaped to spend the last two weeks almost 20 miles away at his grandfather’s house before the Iraqi troops surrendered.
Over the next four years Khalil, one of Iraq’s brightest students, was convinced of his certain death at least three more times, and dodged a lot more bullets until he landed at Georgetown this past August.
Before the War
As Christians living under the Saddam Hussein regime, Khalil and his family avoided politics as much as they could.
“Christians are really peaceful people in Iraq … [they] were basically technical people … they were mostly engineers, doctors,” Khalil said. “They didn’t go into politics … No one was interested in getting into this trouble—we don’t cause trouble, we don’t bring trouble.”
Regardless, by the time Khalil reached age fifteen, his teachers pressured him daily to join the Baath party, which he resisted until one of his teachers threatened to bar him from taking the national exams that year.
Hussein awarded Baath party members an additional five percentage points on their exams, which affected Khalil the most. In a system where students were placed in professional schools right out of high school based on their exam scores, only the highest-scoring students could attend medical school.
“I was depressed,” Khalil said. “Most of [the students] … had parents who weren’t Baath party members, and so they couldn’t go to medical school because they couldn’t get those extra five [points].”
When Khalil took the national exams at age 12 he placed first in all of Iraq. He joined the Baath party at 15 so he could take the national exams for entrance to high school. Khalil placed first again.
Picking up the Pieces
The U.S. invaded Iraq during Khalil’s fifth year of high school—the U.S. equivalent of junior year. Khalil was 17 at the time and gearing up for his final year, after which he would take the national exams a third time for placement in a college. Within two months of Baghdad’s fall, Khalil, along with other students who stayed in the city, resumed their studies.
“The teachers started teaching for no money, they just wanted to teach, because they wanted to move on … we just wanted to finish the year,” Khalil said.
The electricity in his house was spotty at best, and it was too dangerous to travel around. Khalil began to study on his roof, reading and watching the American tanks nearby.
Three weeks after the war ended, Khalil began translating for the American troops that came into his district to clean up the remaining bombs and arms that the Iraqi troops left behind. Many of his friends who translated got paid anywhere from $7 to $25, but Khalil worked for free.
“I didn’t want to work for money, it was just like joining the Baath party,” Khalil said. “I wanted to act as I wanted … Once you get paid, you’re not doing good, you’re doing your job. I just wanted to help my neighborhood, and that’s it.”
Customarily, Iraqi students would hire private tutors for the summer between their fifth and sixth years of high school, because the material covered would make up only half of the material on the national exams at the end of the year. But Khalil’s father had lost his job and there was no money for a private tutor, so Khalil borrowed books and taught himself Physics 1 and 2, Chemistry 1 and 2 and Organic Chemistry on top of his roof in the midst of daily firefights between the insurgents and the Army.
Khalil’s family lived in a particularly vulnerable area of Baghdad. Right next to the highway that led into the Anbar province, a Sunni-dominated area, Khalil’s house was a hot spot for insurgent attacks on American troops coming in and out of Anbar. Sometimes while Khalil studied he would witness four or five firefights a day between the army and the insurgents, but he learned to adapt.
“If every Iraqi had to worry about numerous mines and bombs and firefights, no one [would be] able to live,” he said. “You had to accept this normal possibility that you won’t come back alive. You just had to accept it. Because if you don’t go out, you don’t [make] money, you don’t get food, you don’t get to study. You can’t just hide forever.”
Khalil ranked tenth the third time he took the National Exams, which placed him in Al Nahrain College, a medical school that had been founded by Saddam Hussein in 1987 for the best students in Iraq.
The Book Bag
During his three years of college it became increasingly dangerous for Khalil to travel home. By the beginning of his third year, Khalil’s family moved to the relatively safe and peaceful city of Arbil in Northern Iraq, while Khalil stayed behind in Baghdad to continue his studies.
Before his family left for the north, Khalil, who had spent the summer taking classes, wanted to go home. To get there, however, Khalil had to take two buses, one through a Shiite section and the second through a Sunni area.
Iraqi Army troopers stopped the second bus midway through the ride and told the driver to turn around—a fight had broken out between insurgents and the Army, and it would be unsafe for the driver to continue. But Khalil wanted to go home, so he forged ahead, on foot, down the wide main street.
“Two minutes later all hell broke loose,” Khalil said. “The main street is so wide, it’s really wide … and I was alone in this street. Bullets were flying all over the place, and I didn’t know where the bullets were coming from.”
Khalil was also carrying a backpack, commonplace for any student but a dangerous accessory in Iraq.
“I’m a male, walking in a street for some reason, and carrying a bag makes it worse … I could be like a suicide bomber. So I knew I was going to die anyways,” Khalil said matter-of-factly. “I didn’t know what to do because if I go back where I came from, this is like the center of the army, and a guy coming back with a bag means killing him and if I go forward, I’m going straight to the hellfire source.
“And I couldn’t just drop the bag,” with 30 pounds of free medical textbooks, he said. “I called my friend, I called him and said—I’m not kidding—’Good-bye my friend. If I don’t call you back within thirty minutes call my parents and tell them to go look for me’ … And so I started walking, towards home,” Khalil said.
The gunfire increased as Khalil weaved his way forward through the alleys. Then, almost as suddenly as it began, the shooting stopped.
It was as if nothing had happened,” Khalil said, adding that the bullets littering the road were the only evidence of what had just happened.
“Iraqis are agile people. If something happens they disappear; as soon as it ends everything returns to normal as if nothing had happened. I probably would crack jokes with them,” Khalil said, nonchalantly adding in demonstration: “ah, look here, some bullets, some guy got killed.” He then shrugged, “We eventually were, like, sarcastic about it, because if you keep wailing and weeping, you’ll just have to kill yourself. So you become funny.”
Khalil pointed out, however, that his stories are hardly unique.
“Every Iraqi student would have a lot of stories. It’s like when Superman was on Krypton, he wasn’t Superman. Everyone was just like him on Krypton. But when he came to earth he became Superman. I’m actually really normal. Everyone has a story, and if I was talking like this in front of my friends, they would be like ‘agh, pshh, I have a better story … much better stories.’”
The Video Conferences
Two weeks before the Iraq War began, a non-profit NGO called Global Nomads Group, organized a video conference via satellite between a group of Iraqi students, Khalil among them, and a group of American students from the Metropolitan Learning Center in Bloomfield, Connecticut. With his sense of humor, Khalil distinguished himself during the conference, cracking jokes about how he didn’t have a bomb in his pocket, nor did he like riding camels—and the Americans looked nothing like shoot-’em-up “pow-pow” cowboys.
GNG held a second video conference two weeks after the war ended, and Khalil was the only Iraqi student to keep in touch with the people at GNG. Beth Rickman, a member of GNG’s Board of Directors, has been corresponding with Khalil over the past four years.
After GNG had helped Ingrid, a girl from Rwanda, apply and get in to both Georgetown and Stanford (she chose Stanford), Georgetown alumnus Christopher Plutte, chairperson of GNG, suggested Khalil be given a chance to apply.
Applying was a tedious process, both logistically and emotionally, but the positive attitudes of Khalil’s father and Rickman’s compensated for Khalil’s “realism,” and he sent in what Kate Timlin, Senior Assistant Director of Undergraduate Admissions, called a very thoughtful and genuine application.
Khalil was informed of his acceptance to Georgetown on May 4.
“I just became numb. It was like, ‘Okay, I’m accepted, okay I’m going to start with the papers.’ But the problem wasn’t the papers, it’s wasn’t the numbness, it was the what if? Because how the hell am I going to get there?”
Coming to America
There were numerous obstacles in getting Khalil out of Iraq and into Georgetown. Aside from his father and Beth Rickman, who would be his sponsor in the U.S., no one, including Khalil, thought that he would be able to leave.
“I didn’t believe at all in [making it to] Georgetown,” Khalil said. “I never believed in it till I landed here.”
Conditions got considerably worse during his last year in Iraq. Four of his close friends were either kidnapped or killed, and both his beloved grandfather and his favorite aunt died during his second semester, while he was in the midst of applying to Georgetown.
“I didn’t see the point of the whole thing,” Khalil said. “My best friends are getting killed left and right. And I’m not sure I’m going to live myself.”
The situation got so dangerous for Khalil that he couldn’t stay in Baghdad long enough to take his final exams. Khalil spent the summer with his family in the North, waiting for and filling out papers from Georgetown.
Khalil had to get a new passport, fill out an I-20 form, which indicated Georgetown’s support of Khalil, and wait for financial papers from Rickman, all in preparation for the big obstacle that loomed ahead: getting into Jordan. The U.S. Embassy in Iraq was not issuing student visas, so the next viable country from which Khalil could get a visa was Jordan. But it was “technically impossible,” according to Khalil, for an Iraqi male under 45 years old to gain entry into Jordan. But he would try, and he wouldn’t buy a round-trip ticket, either.
At this point Khalil had a team in America working almost daily to make sure he could get to Georgetown in August. Assistant Dean Tad Howard, Timlin and Melanie Buser and Kathy Bellows at the Office of International Programs were in constant communication with each other and Khalil the entire summer.
But there was nothing they could do to get him into Jordan, and everyone—Khalil, his parents, Rickman, and the Georgetown team—breathed a collective sigh of relief when he was let into Jordan after three long hours of waiting in customs.
There were still frustrating delays and setbacks for Khalil while he waited in Amman for his visa, but eventually, a few strokes of luck landed him on a plane for Chicago a few days after classes at Georgetown had started.
“The Craziest Four Days Ever”
Khalil made it to Georgetown a week after classes started. His first days were “the craziest four days ever.”
“During these four days I always had this 50/50. Fifty percent wanting to just go and cry and say I can’t do it, and fifty saying no, let’s go for it.”
Despite the continued support of the administrators who helped him get here, especially Dean Howard, Khalil found little help anywhere else.
“I was really annoyed because no one cared,” he said. “Because back then I was realizing the whole heroic thing that had happened, and no one cared. I was just like another student who … didn’t make it to classes, and that’s it … I was lost. I was seeing students who had finished a whole novel in theology, and I wasn’t getting any help from any professor. I would go and introduce myself, expecting some help, and nothing. They would say, ‘welcome.’”
Khalil also had to get accustomed to the system of undergraduate education coming from medical school in Iraq.
“He’s been in a very different curriculum,” Howard said, adding that one of Khalil’s biggest changes is “making the adjustment from a professional education to the liberal arts format we take.”
Housing put Khalil in a Village A apartment with three seniors including Voice contributing editor Phil Perry (COL ‘08). Its not bad for a sophomore, but the grade disparity has not been great for his social life. Having missed both the international students’ pre-orientation and New Student Orientation, Khalil says that he has had more difficulty getting acclimated socially than academically.
Khalil finally caught up with work by the middle of September, about three weeks after he first arrived on the Hilltop, and he is no shrinking violet in class. Always ready with answers, and more often than not, questions, Khalil seems to have gotten somewhat of a reputation among his classmates already.
At a Halloween party last weekend Khalil (dressed as a mad scientist—he made the costume from scratch, including the glasses) was talking to a girl from his genetics class. He asked if she remembered him, but she did not.
He told her he was the guy from her genetics labs who asks questions.
“Oh, I hate you,” she blurted out. To be fair, Khalil said, she was pretty drunk. But still, he was a little put off.
“I just enjoy asking questions,” he said. “I think the point of study is to ask questions.”
Is Khalil happy?
“I’m pleased,” he said.
