Actions of Times Square's would-be bomber hurt lawful Iraqi immigrants

The SUV contained gasoline and alarm clocks and was parked in a heavily touristed area. (Henny Ray Abrams / Associated Press)

They come to the U.S. to make a better life for themselves, but can't escape Muslim extremism.

Television and other media have been popping with news about the would-be bombing in Times Square and the arrest of a suspect, just as he attempted to jet out of the country.

The fact the wanted man originally came from the Muslim world provided a chilling reminder, for anyone who needed one, that the United States remains a target for terrorists.

The news arrived at an odd time for me, though, because I had been talking to reporters about a Muslim man entirely different than Faisal Shahzad -- the kind of Muslim man who for years has faced incredible danger to support American journalism and a foreign notion known as freedom of the press. Also the kind of Muslim man who will pay his dues for a fair shot at our way of life.

As the United States continues to draw down its forces in Iraq, news operations in Baghdad are cutting back. Some of the Iraqi translators, reporters and office managers, who enabled U.S. news outlets to tell the story over the last seven years, are coming to our country as refugees.

Having met a couple of these characters during a short rotation in The Times' Baghdad bureau, I can tell you this: These are people any of you would want to have in your newsroom, in your neighborhood, in your life.

But don't take the word of a dilettante who spent just a month in Iraq several years ago. Take it from Tom Lasseter, an acclaimed McClatchy newspapers reporter, who produced terrific stories for the first several years of the Iraq war.

Lasseter told me on Tuesday by phone from China, where he's now posted, that he couldn't have done a lot of it without a unimposing Muslim man named Omar, his one-time translator, who later became the McClatchy bureau's office manager.

"During very bad, very dark times, it was people like Omar who allowed reporters to report the facts on the ground in Iraq," Lasseter said of his colleague, who immigrated to Massachusetts last year.

"I trusted him so much I went a lot of places and got a lot of stories I couldn't have gotten without that absolute trust," added Lasseter, whose coups included a piece that showed how an Iraqi military unit wasn't so different from vengeance-fueled militias terrorizing the country. "I knew he would pick me up off the ground and put me in a car if it came to that. That is everything when you are in a place like Iraq."

When I called Omar on Tuesday morning, he apologized for being a bit drowsy after working the overnight shift as a stock clerk at a Target store in Lowell, Mass.

In a measure of how his old life in Iraq has not fully receded, he asked that I publish only his first name. Thugs and murderers in his native land don't take kindly to "infidels" who dare to work alongside Americans. Even relatives left behind could be in danger from his past complicity.

The U.S. government recognizes the real danger by granting Omar, his family and people like them, refugee status and a pass to the United States.

The good news for the former graphic artist, his wife, 6-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son is that they have escaped the bombings, kidnappings and beheadings that turned their once beloved Baghdad into a horrorscape. "Now we can take the kids out to play and thank God they are OK," said Omar, 40.

His daughter already speaks English like a native and is thriving in first grade, telling her proud father, "I am like a sponge."

The immigrant has found making a living in this new world, especially during a severe economic downturn, a bigger challenge. A master's degree doesn't count for much here, so Omar works overnight unloading trucks and stocking shelves. He makes roughly minimum wage.

When I asked him to talk about his hopes, Omar paused for a long while. He said he didn't want to sound ungrateful. But he conceded that he would like to work more and for more money.

"I know it's very difficult now," he said. "I don't want anyone to give me anything. I am a hard worker. I learn fast. I do many things."

In a war zone like Iraq, where just living day-to-day requires heroism, people like Omar don't attract any special attention.

Lasseter recalled trips with Omar (and sometimes with his brothers, who worked as drivers) into insane, Godforsaken parts of the desert. The work often plunged Omar into Shia turf where his Sunni first name, alone, could mark him for death.

Still he never hesitated to act as translator, cultural guide, goodwill ambassador and bodyguard. A group of men once stopped the journalists in front of a mosque, furiously issuing orders. Omar stood his ground, Lasseter having no clue what the Arabic-speaking men wanted.

Only later did the reporter learn that the band intended to kidnap him.

"Omar just quoted passages from the Koran about how one should treat a guest," Lasseter said. "He never looked away. He is not a very tall man. He is not a very big man. But he always knew how to stay calm."

The duo walked away from that harrowing incident and many more. Once, when the airport had been shut for security reasons, the Iraqi minder assembled several other men and accompanied Lasseter on the long, terrifying drive across Anbar province to Jordan.

The "fried" reporter desperately needed to escape the war zone and Omar took it as his duty to help him, though Al Qaeda insurgents would almost certainly have killed the group, had it been captured.

Finally, about a year ago, Omar decided he had to take the opportunity to get his family out of the danger zone.

That put him in much the same position as other Iraqis who left home, after helping the U.S. military and contractors. Many of those workers, who risked their lives, have gotten little support from the government or the companies that hired them, as detailed last year in reporter T. Christian Miller's investigationhttp://www.propublica.org/series/disposable-army for ProPublica and the Los Angeles Times.

The Iraqi journalists who have come here, including a handful of Los Angeles Times translators, tend to say how lucky they were to work with Westerners after the 2003 invasion -- making them among a minority of their countrymen with stable jobs and income.

Any help they have received since moving to the U.S. has tended to come not from news organizations but from individual American journalists, in the form of job referrals or in house-hunting leads. Others have gotten little or nothing from their former employers.

It's not a topic that the Iraqi journalists raise. When I asked about it, they tended to demur, saying they wanted to take responsibility for their futures and did not want to jeopardize their welcome in this country.

Omar told me he wants only a chance to move forward, a path made a little more uneasy when some criminal -- who appears to share his religion but nothing else -- plants a bomb in the heart of New York City.

"God forbid anything bad will happen," said Omar, who wants to become an American citizen. "I went away from my country because of the violence and the terrorism. I want to start a new life and raise my family peacefully."

With a rueful laugh, he added: "And now they are following me."

james.rainey@latimes.com

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