KIRKUK, Iraq — After four days in the back of a semi truck, Ayad Amin Hussein ran out of his meager rations of cookies and Fanta. He had not seen his wife and son in months and was under constant threat of arrest.
This was the easy part of his journey out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
After fleeing Saddam’s regime in the 1990s, Hussein returned to Iraq five years ago and has worked here as a soldier, a NATO adviser and now as bilingual-bicultural adviser to an American Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kirkuk province.
"He brings a cultural knowledge of not just Kirkuk, but the different elements within Iraq," said Howard Keegan, who leads the reconstruction team.
Hussein, 39, a former English teacher, began his journey out of Iraq and back again began in 1993 when Saddam’s intelligence service approached him about becoming a spy — his command of Kurdish, English and Arabic was invaluable to the regime. It was less a recruitment than an order: join or face jail.
He decided to flee, slipping out of his home in the northern city of Kirkuk and heading east to Sulaymaniyah, where he eventually found work with the United Nations as a translator and got married.
But in 1996, when Saddam sent troops into northern Iraq to intervene in violence between rival Kurdish political parties, Hussein, who is Kurdish, saw his name on a list of undesirables and fled the country, leaving his wife and infant son behind for fear of taking them on the perilous journey he faced.
A smuggler took him and more than 30 others over steep, jagged mountains in the dead of winter into Iran. Two mules walked ahead of the group to alert them of minefields left behind after the Iran-Iraq War. One mule didn’t make it.
From Iran they walked to Turkey, where Hussein said they were shelled by Turkish troops. Many in his party were injured, some killed.
"I was just lucky," he said.
They walked for days, eventually crossing into Turkey, unfriendly terrain for a Kurd, where they took a bus to Istanbul. There another smuggler asked where he wanted to go.
"I told him, ‘Anywhere outside of Turkey,’" he said.
The smuggler had Hussein cram into a small space in a truck laden with boxes of chocolate and told to limit what he ate because there would be no bathroom for days. His only clue to his location was the language spoken by border guards. When he heard Italian he knew he was in Western Europe and tantalizingly close to freedom.
Eventually, Hussein made his way to the Netherlands, where he spent a year in a refugee camp before being reunited with his wife and his son, who had been separated so long from his father that he did not recognize him.
After learning Dutch, Hussein joined the Dutch army and served three tours in Iraq, rising to the rank of captain.
He later served as a cultural adviser to NATO before taking a similar role with U.S. forces. For the past 18 months, he has worked with Keegan and the Kirkuk PRT, aiming to foster reconciliation between ethnic groups in Kirkuk.
"I’m going back to help my people, I’m going back to tell them what I learned," he said, explaining why he has come back time and time again to his war-torn country.
Slight and unassuming, Hussein navigates his dizzying world with a soft-spoken manner and easy smile that belies the simmering tensions of Kirkuk province, where Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and other minorities are wrestling for control of the oil-rich region.
Hussein and the team of Iraqi interpreters and advisers who work with the PRT help the Americans broker high-level negotiations between political parties and help with the details — such as how to properly thank the Turkmen delegation for a recent gift of spiced rice and vegetable dolma — that help smooth relations between Americans and Iraqis.
"They’re crucial to the success of the mission," said Jeffrey Ashley, U.S. Agency For International Development representative for the team. "Without them, we couldn’t do it."
In addition to English, Arabic, Dutch and Kurdish, Hussein also speaks Turkish and Farsi.
And he speaks them all in the dialect of diplomacy, Keegan said.
Politicians from parties across ethnic lines trust Hussein and will often call him to convey messages to the Americans.
"People have learned that he is a true neutral," Keegan said. "He may be a Kurd, but he’s not going to take sides."
