While traveling between Baghdad and Fallujah in Iraq, Iraqi-American Sami Rasouli and his driver took a side road.

Soon American soldiers in Humvees emerged behind them and surrounded their vehicle, guns pointed.
Rasouli held up his Minnesota driver’s license to show he is American.

“No s—-,” said one of the soldiers.

“You betcha,” Rasouli responded.

It was a happy ending. But he brought up the encounter during his talk Wednesday at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse’s Main Hall to illustrate the terror he said Iraqis have been living under since American troops began occupying his native country. To U.S. soldiers, each Iraqi vehicle is a suspected car bomb, he said.

Rasouli came to the U.S. in 1985 to seek medical treatment for his deaf son, and because he was being pressured to join the Baath party.

He sold his popular Sinbad’s restaurant in Minneapolis to return to Iraq in late 2004.

Since Feb. 12, he has been traveling throughout the U.S. to tell Americans what he saw in his homeland.

The majority of Iraqis want the U.S. troops to leave, said Rasouli. As he spoke, slides appeared on a screen behind him, showing bombed-out buildings and cars, sewage in the streets, children in schools without chairs or desks, orphans, people who lost limbs to explosions.

“It is the cradle of civilization,” Rasouli said of Iraq, “but now it is very depressing.”

Inspired by Tom Fox — whose body was found earlier this month after being kidnapped in Iraq — and other members of the Christian Peacemakers Team, Rasouli and others formed a Muslim Peacemakers Team that worked with the Christian group.

Iraqis were told the Americans would make their lives better, but they are only suffering, Rasouli said during a Newsmaker interview at WLSU Radio Station earlier Wednesday. “Iraqis today are much worse today than they were three years ago,” he said.

The Iraqi people realize Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator who killed all who opposed him, Rasouli said. “But he kept the country secure. Health and education were better, and women were enjoying some rights. I hear people say, ‘I wish Saddam was not gone.’”

Under the Americans, only the oil is well-guarded, he said.

Many Iraqis now have hepatitis because drinking water isn’t clean, and electricity is available less than four hours a day, he said, adding “Why can’t the most powerful country in the world fix the power grids or the water supply?”

In addition to thousands of Iraqi people killed, the country’s historical sites and artifacts have been lost in the bombings and fires, he said.

The only jobs available, he said, are with the police, Iraqi Army or intelligence, all targets of the insurgency.

The U.S. government uses rumors of a pending civil war as “the devil, so they can stay,” he said.

If the Americans would leave and take their weapons, the insurgents would lay down their arms, peace would come to the country, and a government of consensus would be created, he predicted.

“I understand why Tom Fox and his comrades crossed the ocean armed only with love,” he said. “He was found dead, but his message of peace doesn’t die.”

Joan Kent can be reached at (608) 791-8221 or jkent@lacrossetribune.com.

Rasouli to speak again tonight at Viterbo

Iraqi American Sami Rasouli, who has spent the past six months working in Iraq, will talk about his experience during the war at 6:30 p.m. today in room 127 of Viterbo University’s Reinhart Center, Ninth and Jackson streets.

The event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Student Organization Advocating Human Rights and Viterbo’s world languages, history and criminal justice departments.

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