A torturous journey to freedom
              Doctor flees Iraqi home to find liberty

              September 12, 2000

              By David Keim, News-Sentinel staff writer

              Dr. Hussein Kammona, an emergency room physician at Methodist Medical Center in Oak Ridge, takes a
              break in his afternoon to pray in the doctors' lounge. "The United States literally saved my life," he says,
              recalling his family's harrowing flight through a desert to escape Saddam Hussein's forces. Only intercession
              by an American diplomat prevented his return to Iraq from a refugee camp. News-Sentinel photo by Cathy
              Clarke.

              Dr. Hussein Kammona follows a strict route between his home and his job at Methodist Medical Center in
              Oak Ridge, never deviating, always aware of his proximity to the town's federal reservation, which includes
              a nuclear weapons plant. He's a Shi'a Muslim from Iraq.

              "I don't want to initiate any suspicion from people," he explained.

              When the Oklahoma City federal building exploded, he was working in New Jersey and his friends stopped
              talking to him.

              When he asked a colleague here for directions to a congressman's office, the man joked, "Why? Do you
              want to bomb it?"

              Not even close.

              "The United States literally saved my life," the 41-year-old emergency room physician says. "I think it's part
              of my debt to the United States to be loyal."

              Through the desert

              Kammona heard explosions, gunfire and shouting as Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard drew closer to
              the hospital in Najaf where he was an internist in March 1991, when the Allied cease fire was declared in
              Desert Storm.

              Kammona had criticized the Iraqi dictator and cared for rebel soldiers trying to topple Saddam. He knew
              his life would be in danger if Saddam stayed in power.

              >From his post on the third floor, Kammona heard machine guns downstairs. The Republican Guard had
              arrived.

              He fled down a fire stairwell and out a back door into the parking lot.

              "I thought my heart was going down into my feet," he said.

              In the confusion outside, he was able to get to his late-model Toyota Land Cruiser and drive to his home a
              couple miles away.

              "What are we going to do?" asked his wife, Iman.

              "There are two choices," he told her. "Stay and wait and hope Saddam's army will not know or will not
              punish or will forgive. Or the other possibility is we take our chances (and flee)."

              His opinion: "I don't think Saddam will forgive."

              As they gathered their newborn son, Ali, Kammona grabbed papers that would prove he was a doctor.
              They picked up Kammona's mother and four younger brothers and drove his red truck into the desert,
              headed for Saudi Arabia.

              There was no road, and rocks shredded the tires.

              "I was not a good driver," Kammona said. "Thinking back, I think the reason we lost the tires is that I was
              not driving very cautiously. I was very anxious. That's why I was driving on the rocks sometimes."

              They kept driving by wrapping the metal wheel rims with clothing, towels and material found at abandoned
              Iraqi army camps.

              The camps also provided fuel.

              They drove during the day, westward toward the border, opposite the rising sun. Someone had
              remembered to fill a jug with water, and the women drank first. The men sipped water from the truck's
              wiper fluid tank.

              At night, they slept. "So freezing during the night it was unbelievable," Kammona recalled.

              In about three days, they came to a Saudi checkpoint. A cleric -- a Sunni Muslim, not Shi'a like Kammona's
              family -- told the soldiers to send the family back.

              An officer protested that the Kammonas had done nothing wrong, that they were fleeing an enemy.

              "We don't care about these people," the clergyman responded. "They are Shi'a people. Let Saddam kill
              them."

              Though they share the faith of Islam, Shi'as and Sunnis claim different histories and different interpretations,
              and Saddam targeted Shi'a for destruction.

              The cleric "ordered some soldiers to raise guns in our chest," Kammona said. "I was completely unarmed,
              so I turned to my brother and said, 'Let's go back.'"

              They soon turned west again, however, trying to find someone who would help. A day or so later, they saw
              more soldiers in the distance.

              "We didn't know if they were Americans or Saudis," Kammona said, but he remembered the sympathetic
              Saudi at their last stop.

              "Let's take our chances," he told his brothers.

              He guessed right.

              The Allied soldiers weren't surprised to see the family. Many Iraqiswere fleeing Saddam. The soldiers
              offered drinks and food -- mostly crackers and cheese -- and directed the family to a refugeecamp.

              The Kammonas had eaten grass and some food they had gotten along the way
 
               from Bedouins, nomadic shepherds who live in the desert. "Just what would

              keep you alive. That's all," Kammona said. "I still remember my youngest brother with a smile on his face,
              eating (something substantial) the first time in three days."

              'I need to live in a free country'

              After a couple months on the Iraqi side of the border, the Saudis allowed the refugees in. It was a hard life.

              "It's a refugee camp," Kammona said. "The status of living is as simple as this: 25,000 people in two square
              miles. It literally is a city in two square miles."

              They lived in tents, shaping sand into furniture of sorts, sleeping on the ground.

              Kammona and other doctors began a clinic.

              He also began lobbying for the chance to resettle in Saudi Arabia.

              Instead, the Saudis proposed sending some refugees back to Iraq, including Kammona. He went into hiding
              in the camp, knowing repatriation to Iraq likely meant death.

              Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., the State Department heard of the trouble.

              "We were alarmed at the talk of repatriation ... so I flew out to Saudi Arabia," said Princeton Lyman,
              then-director of the State Department's Bureau for Refugee Programs.

              Lyman met with refugees in a mosque.

              "He was asking, 'How is your life in the camp?'" Kammona recalled. "Nobody was saying anything. They
              said, 'We thank the Saudis.'"

              Kammona was translating for a man next to him as they squatted on the ground. The man urged Kammona
              to tell Lyman what the people really felt.

              "Mr. Ambassador, you were asking about what happens to us, was there any mandatory repatriation of the
              people to Saddam Hussein?" Kammona said.

              That was the question, Lyman confirmed.

              "Yes," Kammona answered. "I am one of the people who was threatened with mandatory repatriation and I
              don't know what will happen after I am talking to you now ... but I need to let you know that this happened
              and these people are afraid to tell you anything."

              He told Lyman he didn't want to live under a Middle East dictatorship, and the American offered to help.

              "I remember that conversation," Lyman said this summer. "We couldn't offer them settlement right in the
              area, except for Iran. The question was, 'Do you totally want to relocate to a different society and culture?'"

              Kammona still remembers his answer.

              "I told him, 'I need to live in a free country.'"

              The fruit of freedom

              Kammona and his family flew into John F. Kennedy airport in New York in early August 1992.

              It had been more than a year since they had fled their home with little more than what they wore.

              They rented two small apartments, sleeping on the floor.

              "My first pillow was my shoes," Kammona said.

              They settled briefly in Bristol, Tenn., then came to Knoxville, where Kammona studied to earn his U.S.
              medical credentials.

              He passed his boards and moved to New Jersey to do his residency at a hospital affiliated with Columbia
              University. After training in internal medicine and pediatrics for four years, he got a job at Methodist and
              returned to Knoxville in 1998. Most of his family lives here.

              His wife, who wears a traditional Muslim head covering, used to get sideways looks in public.

              Kammona feels his sons are held to a higher standard at school.

              And he lives with stereotypes -- the jokes about terrorism, his fears of being suspected of working for Iraq.

              He is called "Dr. K" or just "K" at the hospital, not by his first name, Hussein, as would be common in the
              Middle East. When he introduces himself, he's quick to say, "Hussein -- like King Hussein," not Saddam.

              Yet he speaks of his adopted country gratefully.

              "If you are an immigrant, in this country, with a bit of luck, you can achieve whatever you want," he said. "As
              much as you give this society, they will give you back. I came to this country as a refugee. Within eight years
              I'm living in a house of $250,000."

              Although he left a Muslim culture for the Bible Belt -- his 7-year-old son, Mohammed, recently had to
              explain to a neighbor he believed Jesus was a prophet, not God's son -- he said, "I can, as a Muslim,
              practice my religion in the United States everywhere, not only East Tennessee, and say whatever I think
              much more than any place in Iraq, or I think, any other Arab country."

              In the United States, he has become more open to different cultures and religions.

              "I think I became much more sensitive to different issues," he said. "As long as they don't transgress on my
              rights, I will protect their right to say and do whatever they think is correct. ... This is the fruit of freedom."

              It's far different from Iraq, where he feared talking in his sleep because he knew he might say something
              critical of the government.

              "It is very difficult for me or anybody to explain the terror and the horror living under Saddam Hussein," he
              said.

              "I will consider going back to Iraq if I have American citizenship, to help the Iraqi people, who are my blood
              relatives. But I will go as an Iraqi-American. The U.S. citizenship will be my protection."