A former USAID employee starts a list and a campaign to help resettle hundreds of Iraqis whose lives were threatened for working with the U.S. coalition. An excerpt from Kirk Johnson’s book To Be a Friend Is Fatal:
“I returned to Boston to find a dozen voicemails from journalists and Capitol Hill staffers whose names I had never heard before. I had no idea how everyone was getting my number. When I logged into my email account, I thought at first that my address had been sucked into some Middle Eastern spammer’s list: three out of every four emails were in Arabic.
“I saw a familiar name and opened the message. Ziad had always stood out in the USAID mission as someone with great ambition and an acidic sense of humor. His ambition had bested him, though: he was fired for trying to organize an informal union of the Iraqi employees to fight for better treatment and more protection. One day we noticed he was gone, and that was the end of Ziad, as far as we knew. He wrote to inform me that he was scheduled to flee within a couple days by way of a smuggler’s network and might need my help.”
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