US air strike losses ‘no reason for hatred’
An engineer would rather sow understanding after his family was killed in a misguided air strike by the US-led coalition in Iraq
Basim Razzo’s apartment in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil is pristine, with none of the clutter of most family homes. The spotless kitchen cupboards hold cans of Maxwell House coffee, a brand he and his wife, Mayada Taka, became fond of when they lived in the United States in the 1980s. In the living room next to a wide-screen TV, a pink plush unicorn and other stuffed toys are neatly stacked on a blue armchair, awaiting the next visit of his three-year-old granddaughter, who Mr Razzo said is his life now.
The little girl is also named Mayada, after her grandmother, and Mr Razzo’s late wife. Taka and the couple’s 21-year-old daughter, Tuqa, were killed in an air strike on their home in the Iraqi city of Mosul in 2015 by the US-led coalition fighting the militant Islamic State (IS) group.
Mr Razzo, sleeping just a few metres from his wife, survived, though he was badly wounded. His brother and his nephew died in a second attack on their house next door. Mr Razzo’s other child, his son Yahya, now the father of young Mayada, had fled to Irbil early in the occupation.
Mr Razzo’s case was documented in a 2017 New York Times Magazine investigation that found the deaths of hundreds of civilians in coalition air strikes were never acknowledged by the United States, which oversaw targeting for the anti-IS group missions from Qatar.
Washington has never publicly apologised for mistakenly identifying Mr Razzo’s home as an IS car bomb factory. But last year the Dutch government, a member of the coalition, acknowledged that one of its pilots carried out the strike and awarded Mr Razzo compensation believed to be about US$1 million (32 million baht).
It would be understandable if Mr Razzo were bitter over the attack that killed his wife and daughter and left him badly wounded. But instead he preaches empathy and forgiveness, working with the group World in Conversation to link Iraqi university students in Irbil, Mosul and Najaf with students in the United States through online dialogues.
While he is not ready to meet the Dutch pilot — who is himself haunted by his role in the tragedy — Mr Razzo did send him a message.
“I said, ‘Listen, tell him he was following orders. He’s a soldier. It was his job. If he knew that it was families in here, I am sure he wouldn’t have bombed, but he didn’t know. So tell him I forgive him.’”
In Iraq and many countries, a more common reaction is a vow of revenge.
“Some people say forgiveness is the act of a coward,” he said in an interview recently in Irbil. But as a Muslim, he believes a person’s destiny is determined before they are born.
“I have no other explanation other than it’s an act of God,” he said about the reason he was left alive. “Maybe it was my destiny to do this. Because after that I started preaching ideas, started talking about empathy and started talking about forgiveness.”
Some of that started in a friendship he struck up in 2013 with an American professor after Mr Razzo happened upon his TEDx talk about the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, titled “A Radical Experiment in Empathy”.
In it, the professor, Sam Richards, a sociologist at Penn State University, asked Americans to imagine how they would feel if the United States were invaded and occupied by the Chinese military.
“I didn’t know what the word empathy meant, so I looked it up,” said Mr Razzo, 61. He emailed Prof Richards, who ended up asking him to speak by video link each semester to the 700 students in his sociology class. The students asked him questions about being Iraqi and about Islam, and he felt that he was establishing a real connection with them.
But he cut it off after the bombing.
A year later, “Sam said, ‘Basim, I want you back in my class,’” Mr Razzo said. “I said, ‘Sam, I can’t.’ He said, ‘Please just do it.’”
Actually, he did more than that, travelling to State College, Pennsylvania, to speak to the students in person after they raised money for the trip. While he was in the United States, he met with military officials and lawmakers in a bid to have the military accept accountability for the bombing. To date it has not done that.
He rejected the offer and said he was promised a letter from a military lawyer confirming that none of his family members were associated with the IS group. He has never received it. But that has not stopped him seeking to bridge the divide between Americans and Iraqis.
He started his work with World in Conversation by connecting Mosul students to their US counterparts in 2018, a year after the city was liberated from three years of IS control.
Mr Razzo grew up in a prominent upper-middle-class family in Mosul. He was encouraged by his pharmacist father to study engineering, which he did at the University of Michigan. He and Taka, a cousin, were married, and she joined him there.
Both were in their early 20s, and life was good, he said. While he pursued an undergraduate engineering degree, eventually graduating from Western Michigan University, Taka worked as an Avon representative. They wanted to stay in the United States after he graduated, but it was 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was raging, and his father wanted him home.
“He said, ‘You’re my eldest. I want you to be beside me,’” Mr Razzo said. “Tradition says I cannot say no to my dad. And that was the biggest mistake.”
When the IS overran northern Iraq in 2014, Mr Razzo was an account manager for Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company. Fearing the IS would confiscate their homes and businesses if they left, the family, other than Yahya, decided to stay and found themselves trapped.
On the night of the bombing, Taka went to bed early and Mr Razzo stayed up watching videos on his computer. Seeing light seeping from his daughter’s room, he told her to turn off her cellphone, and then he went to sleep.
The attack came a few hours later.
“The sound of the explosion was indescribable,” he said. There were two explosions: “one on my house, the other on my late brother’s house. And then pitch black. The electricity went out.”
The roof and entire second floor had collapsed, killing his wife and daughter instantly. Next door, only his sister-in-law, who was blown through a window, survived.
Mr Razzo said the ordeal left him a different person.
“Everything changed for me,” he said. “I never had patience. I have patience now. So many things that I do that I never did before,” from trying new foods to embracing new experiences.
For all his emphasis on empathy and forgiveness, he has not forgiven the US military for approving the attack on his house.
“They should have had more surveillance,” he said.
“They should have had ground intelligence. But they did not.”