For gay Iraqi in Turkey, refugee freeze is the cruelest experience

ISTANBUL — For Mohammed, an Iraqi civil engineer, the cruelest experience of his life was not when his father tortured him for being gay.

It was not when Islamic State extremists took over the 26-year-old’s hometown in northern Iraq, forcing him to flee to Turkey. Or when he says he was almost raped at knifepoint and later laughed out of a Turkish police station when he tried to report the crime. Nor was it in January, when President Donald Trump first tried — unsuccessfully — to bar refugees from entering America.

As Mohammed tells it, the cruelest blow came last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to reinstate Trump’s 120-day freeze on refugee resettlement.

Tens of thousands of applicants for resettlement in the United States are affected by the freeze, and Mohammed is among the unluckiest: His application has been accepted for months, and he was simply waiting for the U.S. government to give him an arrival date.

“That is the one that destroyed me the most,” he said Saturday, as he compared the many challenges he has faced in Iraq and Turkey. “I still had some hope before. Now I have none at all.”

Mohammed’s full name and location are being withheld because of the dangers he faces in Turkey.

He is, ironically, fleeing much of the very extremism Trump says he wants to wipe out. Mohammed left Mosul, Iraq, soon after Islamic State militants seized control of the city, when his sister warned him their father had told the extremist group he had a gay son.

But Mohammed’s persecution had started much earlier. In 2009, when he was 18, his father, a former officer in the army of Saddam Hussein, caught him during a sexual encounter with male friends. So began half a decade of torture and abuse. As punishment for his sexuality, Mohammed’s father beat him with metal, and sometimes burned him with a hot skewer. His legs and feet still bear the scars.

He was effectively kept under house arrest, allowed out only to complete his engineering degree, and later to work at a local engineering firm. If he was late arriving home, his father would increase the intensity of the beatings.

With the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, closing in, Mohammed finally decided to escape, taking a bus to Turkey, Iraq’s northern neighbor. Here, he applied for asylum, beginning a long and often Byzantine process during which he was screened by the U.N. refugee agency; the International Catholic Migration Commission, a nongovernmental group that has for decades been involved in the resettlement and vetting of refugees to the United States; and at least three U.S. government agencies, in what U.N. officials have described as the world’s most rigorous refugee-screening system.

In the meantime, Mohammed’s life has never been safe or stable.

Turkey has more non-Palestinian refugees than any other country in the world. But unlike in Western nations, refugees in Turkey are not given the same rights as the indigenous population. The vast majority do not have the right to work, and many resort to exploitative conditions on the black market.

Mohammed found odd factory jobs, but was always paid around half the legal minimum wage and never received social security payments Turkish workers get.

His employment was also easily terminated, as he found out late last year, when a factory manager fired him for developing a friendship with a gay colleague, Mohammed said.

That left him almost destitute, with no income to pay for the tiny room he shares with four strangers whom he does not trust. To keep afloat, Mohammed began to sell his clothes, then his camera, then his watch.

In January, after he was finally approved for resettlement in the United States, Mohammed hoped the windfall from hawking his possessions might tide him over until his departure was confirmed. But then Trump was inaugurated, and confirmation never came. Instead, the president suspended refugee resettlement, a move upheld by the Supreme Court decision last week.

Now Mohammed is thinking of selling his last remaining valuable, his cellphone. He said he was down to his last 20 Turkish lira, less than $6.