Iraqi students get education in U.S.

EUGENE, Ore. – The first of the Iraqi students arrived in Eugene in 2009 in the form of Awab Alrawe, a young refugee from the mayhem and killing in Baghdad.

He was the lone Iraqi among 24,000 students on the University of Oregon campus until last fall, when 15 juniors from the University of Basrah arrived for a yearlong study of English to prepare them to work in the reviving Iraqi oil industry.

Earlier this year, Saleh Najim, the British-educated chancellor of the University of Basra, paid a visit to acting UO President Bob Berdahl.

In a separate initiative, the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education is sending even more students – at least 4,000 – to study abroad next year in a bid to rebuild the country’s educated and professional classes. A yet-to-be determined number of those will travel the 7,000 miles to the UO campus, Najim said.

It’s a leap of faith for Iraqi parents to entrust their youth to a country that so recently dropped bombs on their own land, Alrawe said. And it’s an act of hope for the students who fly to the United States with little knowledge of what they’re getting into.

“Some people thought it would be like a big beautiful city and a friendly place,” Alrawe said. “Others thought the opposite. I didn’t really think anything. I said, ‘I’ll go there.’ ”

When Alrawe grew up in Baghdad in the early 1990s – after the first Gulf War – he was told by government-controlled TV and his grade school curriculum that the United States was evil.

“That’s what I was taught,” he said. “The United States, Israel and Iran are the triangle of evil.”

Alrawe is the son of a geologist and a petroleum engineer. As children, before the United Nations embargo on Iraq, they traveled annually to Italy, Turkey or England.

But they were afraid to contradict the narrow view that their young son was taught at school because they were at the mercy of Saddam Hussein’s security apparatus. They were afraid of what he would repeat at school.

Alrawe was 13 when the United States unleashed its “shock and awe” bombing on Baghdad.

When the bombs fell, something broke open in his family, Alrawe remembers.

“I was bombarded by stories from my father and family. They felt that this was the end of the regime so they shouldn’t be afraid to tell anything.

“For the first time they were talking. They were free,” he said.

Yet within a year, a hostile militia had taken over the Baghdad neighborhood and threatened Alrawe’s father. So the family, as did 2 million other Iraqis, fled to Syria.

After a year, Alrawe’s parents returned to Baghdad so his mother could keep her job at the Ministry of Oil. The parents left their children, Awab and his sister Danya, in Syria to finish their schooling.

When Alrawe finished high school, just before he was to go back to Baghdad, he was put in touch with two New Yorkers, Gabe Huck and Theresa Kubasak, founders of the Iraqi Student Project, which sends war-displaced Iraqi students to U.S. universities.

Since 2007, the organization has persuaded 35 U.S. universities, including the UO, to grant tuition waivers to 50 Iraqi students.

“We want to make reparation for the damage we did to the country,” said Robert Rosser, stateside director of the Iraqi Student Project.

The students sign a promise that they’ll stay at the U.S. universities – and not travel – until they’ve earned their degrees. And then they must return to Iraq to help rebuild.

The UO is getting $3.3 million for 15 students in the oil company-sponsored program and for a related program that will bring 40 Iraqi English teachers over two years for an intensive program at the American English Institute.

Now the lingering trepidation is how to adapt when they return to Iraq.

“Some of them expressed fear of going back, that it would be difficult for them to readjust,” Alrawe said.