Fleeing ISIS: The Story of an Iraqi Interpreter Left Behind
(And Why America Should Care)
By: Tamarra Kemsley
Malak* was 18 years old the day the Americans rolled into his neighborhood, a fleet of camo-wearing Captain Americas come to rescue his people from an oppressive regime.
His uncle, a high-ranking official in Saddam Hussein’s army, had prophesied this day would come. “The Americans are coming to liberate us,” he would say when no one else was listening.
Using what English he’d gathered from school and hotel lobbies to greet them, Malak ran straight for the Marines. Impressed, the troops brought him on to translate for them.
For three days, Mikey — as they called him — arrived early in the morning and stayed late into the night.
“I was around them more than my own family,” he said. “I did everything I could to help. I even bought a dictionary just so I could communicate with them better.” One Marine went so far as to give him a picture of his wife.
But on the fourth day when Mikey showed up, the Marines were gone. Devastated, he walked for miles to the closest base, but there was no sign of them anywhere.
The base did offer some hope, however: It was recruiting members for the Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps. Mikey put his name down. If he was going to find his friends, he figured it would be through the ICDC.
In a sense he was right. Though he never found his original crew, Mikey made new friends with the unit he was stationed with not far from where he grew up. As a local, Mikey became something of an informant. If he heard or saw anything suspicious — a house that’d been converted into an armory or the possible location of an IED — he’d let the Americans know. The way he saw it, they were family, and family watches each other’s back.
It wasn’t long, however, before Mikey was ready for a career change. It was springtime 2004 and the Shiite militia known as Al Mahdi was targeting members of the ICDC, including Mikey.
“I lost more unit mates that way than I can remember,” he said.
It didn’t help that both he and Al Mahdi both hailed from the same slice of Baghdad. They knew him; some of them had even gone to school with him. He was a marked man, and he needed to get out. And so Mikey went to work for the translation contractor Titan, convinced that if he was going to make a difference in the war effort, it would be as an interpreter for the coalition forces.
By April when Mikey signed on as an employee — a process that included having his fingers printed and eyeballs scanned — Fallujah was serving as the frontlines. There in the city’s dusty streets, insurgents were going head-to-head with U.S. troops in a battle that would claim the lives of hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of Americans.
Fallujah was Mikey’s first post.
As the death toll climbed, so did Mikey’s check, which jumped from $800 to $1,050 a month by the time his second payday rolled around. More important than any raise, however, was the promise of a safe life after the war ended. It was a promise Mikey wore to work like a bullet-proof vest.
“Titan said that they if we worked for the United States long enough that our units would take us and our families with them to the U.S.,” Mikey said. “That’s what my site manager told me once upon a time.” He wasn’t the only one. Mikey’s Marine company commander had repeated the same assurance. Mikey believed them. And why not? “I trusted them with my life.”
Mikey had been on the job for less than a year when his loyalty was tested in a hailstorm of bullets. He and his unit were pulling into the Baathist stronghold of Mahmudiyah located south of Baghdad when the radio erupted: They were taking hostile fire.
The Mexican sergeant Mikey shared an unarmored truck with slammed on the gas. All the sergeant had was an M16. Mikey, per Titan policy, was unarmed. “He kept praying nervously in Spanish when all of a sudden he stopped and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mikey. We will be safe.’”
At the end of the 15-minute firefight, the two discovered just one bullet hole in the top rear corner of the passenger side — inches from where Mikey was sitting.
Experiences like these were the DNA that made brothers of the men. Not all revolved around insurgents and firefights, however. Some of Mikey’s happiest memories came while working as an interpreter, like the time he and his buddy Blake feasted on “hot chow” after weeks of the infamous MREs — short for Meal, Ready-to-Eat. And then there was the time when he and his unit were able to shower for the first time after more than three weeks of going without.
“It felt like being set free again after being locked for a while,” Mikey said.
When a platoon mate died in a car bomb on the way back to camp, Mikey felt he’d lost a family member. At the funeral, Mikey’s first time in a church, he cried so hard people stared. But, he said, he couldn’t help it. “I couldn’t help my tears to stop falling down my face to my chest.”
Sgt. Matt Victoriano was among those to serve with Mikey. The way he sees it, interpreters like him were the only reason U.S. troops had any degree of success in Iraq.
“Without them it would have been more of a mess than it already was,” the Arkansas native said. “None of us spoke the language.” Even more than translation, Victoriano explained interpreters acted as modern-day Sacajaweas, guiding the Americans through a strange land of Sunni-Shiite divisions.
After Victoriano returned home, he lost contact with Mikey and eventually assumed his former comrade was dead.
It was a safe assumption given the dangers interpreters like Mikey faced on — and off — the job. As the war continued to wage, liberators became occupiers and anyone associated with them the enemy.
“The Americans didn’t keep their word; they left the country in chaos,” Mikey said. “People started to hate Americans.” And, by extension, him.
In 2005, insurgents captured and beheaded Mikey’s friend and fellow interpreter.
“I saw the video,” Mikey said.
That same year, interpreters accounted for 40 percent of the more than 300 death claims filed by private contractors with the U.S. Labor Department, according to The Associated Press. A year later, more than 20 interpreters working for the British Army were captured and shot in the head in the southern city of Basra — all within a three-week span.
While no official number exists of the former interpreters who have been assassinated, conservative estimates by The List Project to Resettle Iraqi Allies place it at 1,000. But founder Kirk Johnson said his gut puts it in the several of thousands, in part due to a document leaked to him by a major contractor. The file, which Johnson said represents “just a very limited snapshot of just a couple years during the war,” contained the names of 300 interpreters killed.
“And that was one of hundreds of contractors,” said the author of “To Be a Friend is Fatal.”
According to the Department of Defense’s Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker (SPOT) system, 105 companies hired Iraqi nationals to interpret during the course of the war. However, that list includes both contractors and subcontractors as well as multiple listings for those companies that repeatedly traded hands while employing interpreters. And as Department of Defense Spokesman Mark Wright said: “I cannot verify that the accuracy of data prior to 2007, or that it is all inclusive of [the Department of Defense].”
Of the nearly 18,000 interpreters listed in SPOT’s system as having worked during the war, none were reported as being killed while still employed. Though, it’s worth noting that the system wasn’t required to track contractor deaths until the 2008 fiscal year, and by Wright’s own admission, “it took some time to put everything in place to track this accurately.”
These days, Johnson said, “You can talk to any Iraqi who worked for us and they will rattle off the names of colleagues who were killed because they helped the United States.”
But Mikey wasn’t dead, as evidenced in an email that appeared in Victoriano’s inbox last summer. He was, however, on the run and looking for a way out. He couldn’t get a U.S. visa, but what if he made it to Mexico? Could Victoriano smuggle him across the border, he wondered?
“He said that the situation had deteriorated so badly that he had to get out,” Victoriano said. “He also said the U.S. media wasn’t telling the true story of what was going on there.”
By applying for a Special Immigrant Visa, Mikey had tried to cash in on the promise both his commander and Titan had made him of moving to the United States. For two years he waited for approval only to have it revoked after then Brig. Gen. Dana J. H. Pittard pulled his recommendation. Victoriano said the reason goes back to when Mikey accidentally swiped another platoon member’s thumbdrive thinking it was his own. Mikey was detained and interrogated in Abu Ghraib as a result, but released shortly thereafter. Seven other officers — including three lieutenant colonels — continued to stand by Mikey. But it didn’t matter: Pittard was the highest ranking officer in the group, and without his stamp of approval two years of waiting and emailing were suddenly meaningless.
Victoriano said situations like these are all too common. A high-ranking official doesn’t want to be seen as helping anyone with any type of stain — real or perceived.
“Pittard threw him to the wolves,” he said.
Mikey’s son was just a few weeks old when in June the Islamic State blew across the Syrian border like a gust of wind in a wildfire. The militant group, with its murder squads and hitlists littered with the names of former interpreters, changed everything.
Victoriano decided to take action.
To do this, the former Marine teamed up with Gunnery Sgt. Edward Boeringer. Boeringer fought in Iraq in 2004 and 2005 and had a reputation of being someone with connections through his work overseas, including with various government agencies. He was also someone who knew what it was like to lose an interpreter. When Victoriano approached him with the idea of rescuing these men and their families, he didn’t hesitate.
“ISIS is getting information on who worked with the Americans and they’re executing these people in horrific ways,” Boeringer said. “They’re chopping heads off. They’re killing them and their families.”
The two immediately set to work making plans and raising money, always with one eye on ISIS’s steady advances. The result was the Intrepid Brotherhood, an organization dedicated to bringing former Iraqi and Afghan interpreters to safety. First on their list: Mikey.
“We’re very hands-on guys,” Boeringer said. “Even though we have our connections worldwide, we still have to have hands-on, eyes-on and that requires us to travel to different places and be there for certain transactions.”
Such “transactions” will include everything from border crossings to establishing safe houses. And then there is the constant vetting that will be needed, including of the interpreters themselves.
“Just to see what they’ve been up to since we left,” Boeringer said.
These days, the single father of two teenagers says the mission hovers over his family like an impending deployment.
While The List Project’s Kirk Johnson agreed Victoriano and Boeringer’s efforts are heroic, he said there’s just one man capable of bringing the thousands like Mikey to safety before any more are assassinated.
“We know where the problem is, and the problem is in the White House. And the problem is the president has never uttered a syllable about this,” Johnson said, noting that unlike most things, getting Iraqis who helped U.S. troops out is not a partisan issue. It was Congress that came together in 2007 to authorize 25,000 Special Immigrant Visas for distribution to Iraqi allies between 2008 and 2013, with Republicans such as Senators Sam Brownback and Gordon Smith joining hands with Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to do so. It wasn’t until Obama took office that his allergy to all things Iraq set in, Johnson explained.
“They’ve adopted this approach of ‘Hey, this wasn’t our war so we’re not going to get any of its mess on us,’” Johnson said of the administration’s approach up until recently.
The result: Less than 6,000 of the 25,000 visas were actually allocated during the five-year period.
According to Johnson, the reason is a straightforward one as these things go.
“There’s no point beating around the bush anymore,” he said. “There’s absolutely no other reason for this other than the fact that we’re scared that these brown Arab Iraqis are potentially going to do harm to us. And so our policy is basically if you can survive long enough while we think things over beyond any reasonable time frame then maybe we’ll give you a visa.”
He estimated the average wait time for a visa falls somewhere between a year and a half and two years, though he’s seen it stretch into five years and beyond.
“There is absolutely no way that if Obama were to say to his executive branch agencies ‘Get this done’ that it would take years to process a case,” he said.
The motivation to do so goes beyond the moral obligation of helping those who helped us, Johnson stressed. By locking the door behind it and throwing away the key, the government is sending a clear signal to any would-be allies, he warned.
“Given the legacy of our treatment of the Iraqis and Afghans that believed in us enough to help us, a legacy that amounts to bureaucratic abandonment, why on Earth would anyone want to step forward to help us in the future?” Johnson said. “If siding with the United States becomes seen as a death sentence, we better develop the most multilingual and multicultural military on the face on the planet, because we’re not going to be able to rely on much help in the next war.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising then that, in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sept. 28, Obama was quick to concede that the United States had overestimated both the willingness and ability of the Iraqi Army to fight the growing threat of ISIS.
“That’s true. That’s absolutely true,” Obama said when asked about Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s admission of the miscalculation.
Mikey puts it this way: “Do they really give a damn about us? No, and I’m the perfect example. They left me behind.”
Call it a war. Call it a counterterrorism operation. Either way, the moment of truth has arrived, maybe faster than even Johnson anticipated. The United States can only hope its reputation does not precede it.
In the meantime, Mikey is on the run — family in tow.
*Name changed to protect subject’s identity.
