A mother’s battle

Ali Medhi hoped his prayer was strong enough.

Tears welled up in his eyes, but he didn’t care. He knelt in the cool darkness of the mosque and prayed for his mother to take him and his little brother home.

Ali, 14, and Saif, 12, were in Iraq. Home was in Everett.

It was October,

and they’d been here for almost 16 months. The boys’ father, Medhi Al-Abadi, brought them to Iraq for a summer visit and refused to let them return to the United States.

Ali and Saif were moved from house to house, from city to city. But that didn’t prevent their mother from finding them. She was with them now, and the next few days would decide whether they could stay together and if she could get them home.

Born in Snohomish County to Iraqi immigrants, Ali and Saif were strangers in their parents’ homeland. The American teenagers wanted to go back to school, to their friends and the familiar streets of Everett.

That night, with their mother in the holy city of Karbala, was the closest they felt to home in more than a year.

“Please, let everything work out soon,” Ali asked God during the evening prayer. “Let us go home.”

Weeks turn to months

Fatin Al-Aboudy was reluctant to let her boys visit her husband’s relatives in Iraq because she didn’t want to miss them. They’d never been apart for long.

Al-Aboudy and her husband divorced just months earlier, and he moved out of their south Everett apartment. She had legal custody of the children and thought, as a good parent, she wanted to give him this opportunity to spend time with his sons.

They left in June 2009. She was only a little worried after a few weeks passed and the boys still hadn’t called, which was unusual. She called Iraq but could never get the boys on the phone. The boys’ father never gave the exact date they were coming back. Still, Al-Aboudy put her worries aside.

The new school year approached. Then classes started. The boys were still not home. She told her ex-husband the boys needed to return immediately.

Medhi told her they were never coming back.

“I felt like I was literally dying. Finished,” she said. “I was praying for my kids to come back home.”

Her voice carried the desperation of that moment even as she recounted the story months later from the comfort of her home.

Al-Aboudy’s home is decorated with Arabic decor and a Persian rug. She doesn’t spend much time here. She juggles two or more jobs to provide for Ali and Saif, pulling a graveyard shift at a hotel three or four nights a week and working as a caregiver the rest of the time. The boys usually do homework and play with friends at the small community center in their apartment complex.

Gunfire in the night

Bursts of gunfire sometimes woke Ali and Saif at night when they stayed in their uncle’s house in Baghdad. They slept on foldout mattresses on the floor, common in Iraq. Ali guessed that the shots fired in quick succession came from automatic weapons. He heard that a bullet fired upward can fall with enough speed and force to kill innocent bystanders on the ground.

“I was pretty scared. You don’t know where that bullet’s gonna go.”

Saif remembers waking up at 2 o’clock one morning.

“There was an explosion, then yelling, then sirens. It wasn’t that far from our house,” he said.

They also got used to the lights and roar of helicopters scouring for someone among dark buildings at night.

Ali realized something was wrong a couple of months after he arrived in Iraq. His father wouldn’t let him or Saif talk to their mother on the phone. He kept coming up with reasons to stay in Iraq longer. They kept moving from one city to the next, staying with different relatives. Ali didn’t want to worry his brother.

From the very beginning of the trip, Ali didn’t like his father’s attitude.

“He told us things to make us think our mother didn’t love us, but I never believed it,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I hate him. I just don’t like what he did. It shows he wasn’t being a good father.”

He grew more and more frustrated with his father and could see through the excuses given for not being able to speak with his mother, for staying longer.

The brothers, who speak, read and write Arabic, enrolled in an Iraqi school when they were staying in Najaf, the holy Shiite city in central Iraq. Ali’s school was a large building in the middle of the city. It was all stone, with practically no windows. There were chalkboards.

“The kids were asking us all these questions. It was just awkward,” Ali said. “What’s your house like in America? What’s your school like?”

It was May, around the time of his birthday, when Saif realized he wasn’t going home.

“I felt kind of weird inside,” he said. “But my mom started calling, and I knew she would come.”

Setbacks

It was February 2010 when Al-Aboudy finally was able to fly to Iraq. Her ex-husband had lied to local authorities that the boys were Iraqi citizens. Police not only refused to help her but actually came to arrest her when Medhi complained that she was the person trying to kidnap the children.

It was a woman’s word against a man’s. She had forgotten how much that still mattered in Iraq.

She pleaded with Medhi’s relatives for help, but they didn’t want to get involved. Family is important in Iraq.

But what puzzled her most was how much her ex-husband had changed.

“I swear to God, I stayed with this man for 16 years. He’s a quiet man; smart. You’d never think he would do something like this.”

She still believes Medhi loves his children. He just refused to understand what was best for them.

She flew back to Everett, defeated this time but determined to get her sons back.

Most of Al-Aboudy’s family moved to Everett in 1993 as refugees. They fled Iraq during the Gulf War and spent the next two years in Saudi Arabia. Al-Aboudy has dual citizenship with the United States and Iraq. Ali and Saif were born and raised in Snohomish County.

Back at home, friends told Al-Aboudy she needed to arm herself with paperwork. She started gathering the boys’ birth certificates and school papers. Federal officials in Seattle told her to head to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

Spring came, then summer. The boys had been gone a year. During this time, she hardly went anywhere besides work. The sounds that used to fill her home — children laughing and playing — came from outside the apartment now.

“There were times when I thought I would never see my kids again. I would go to a grocery store, see a mom with kids and start crying,” she said.

Far from home

People always knew Ali and Saif were American because of the way they dressed, walked and talked. They had an accent when they spoke Arabic. They didn’t like the attention and stayed in a lot, watching MTV Arabia, playing video games and wrestling.

“I liked to play soccer. Iraqis are pretty good at soccer,” Ali said.

Life in Iraq was different in many ways.

The boys’ relatives mostly lived in nice parts of the city, but the brothers caught a glimpse of poor neighborhoods with brick and clay huts.

Electricity was scarce. The national system that dispenses electricity was damaged by American bombs years ago, Ali said. Sectioned blackouts were common in the cities where the brothers were staying. Most electricity came from generators shared between neighbors.

The brothers saw American soldiers on the street.

“They were passing by in big bulletproof cars, waving at you. They had American flags,” Saif said.

Ali knew they could help. All he needed to do was tell them he was American.

Still, he never tried because he was afraid he’d be separated from his brother. He also didn’t want to get his father’s family into trouble.

Flight from Iraq

Al-Aboudy found it easier to keep her spirits up after getting a surprise call from Ali sometime that summer. He’d found an excuse to leave the house alone, gone to a city market and bought a prepaid cellphone. He was able to hide it and call his mother from time to time. Al-Aboudy’s heart broke every time her sons pleaded with her to come for them.

It took months to scrape together enough money and get all the necessary documents from U.S. officials. In September, she flew back to Iraq. She had a plan. The boys slipped out of the house where they were staying and met their mother in a safe place.

Of course, they couldn’t just leave. Their absence was quickly discovered, and Medhi went to local courts.

Three Iraqi judges heard the case and ordered Al-Aboudy and the boys’ father to talk. She didn’t trust the local authorities to make a fair decision.

“I felt that I was losing again. It wasn’t good,” Al-Aboudy said.

She feared her ex-husband could convince the local court to rule in his favor.

She decided to steal the boys back.

She went to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where she told officials her plan. They loaned her money, helped her find three plane tickets back to the U.S. and told her to act quickly.

Medhi had the boys’ passports, but they were able to get temporary documents at the embassy. Ali describes it as a city within a city.

“It was huge. They even had their own swimming pool,” he said.

The embassy, dubbed Fortress America, is the biggest in the world.

They were at the Baghdad airport in a day or two. It took a long time to go through security. It was crowded and hot, like everywhere in Iraq.

Al-Aboudy couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was after them. Airport security picked up on her nervousness and became suspicious — she wasn’t the first person there to be running from something. It didn’t help that Al-Aboudy and the boys had no luggage, though she lied to security that her mother flew ahead of them with their things.

She used what little money she had left — 2,000 dinars — $1.71 — to bribe the airport guard. That was it.

The moment the plane took off finally brought relief. It was October 2010.

In a way, history was repeating itself: Al-Aboudy was fleeing her country to keep her kids out of harm’s way, just like her own mother did in the early ’90s. The Iraq she loved during her last visit in 2004 was gone.

“You know, I used to miss Iraq. I don’t miss it anymore,” she said.

Epilogue

Al-Aboudy and the boys settled back into their normal lives. It must have been difficult for Ali and Saif to return to school, but they don’t let on. They were just happy to see their friends.

Today Ali, 15, is a freshman at Mariner High School. He wrestles and dreams about opening his own fitness center. Saif, 12, goes to Explorer Middle School and likes reading and social studies.

For Ali, his return corresponded with starting high school. He didn’t have to struggle too much to catch up with schoolwork.

“In high school, you have to act older. You are meeting a lot of new people, and you have to be more responsible for your actions,” he explained.

It came easy to him — he grew up a lot this past year in Iraq. He no longer takes his mother or his life in Everett for granted.

He and Saif have both talked with their dad on the phone since they returned.

“I know we can have a relationship with him if we want to,” Ali said. “We’ll see what happens.”

Katya Yefimova: 425-339-3452, kyefimova@heraldnet.com