Who are the Kurds? A refugee on American amnesia
Beneath a tent and behind barbed wire in Turkey's Mardin refugee camp, Kasar Abdulla's family didn't know they would someday build a life in Nashville.
“For the first year, we thought we were going home,” Abdulla recalled.
When Saddam Hussein bombed her town in northern Iraq with chemical weapons as part of his Anfal campaign against the Kurds, her family fled into the mountains where they hid for some 40 days.
Photos from that time, kept by the Kurdish Democratic Party, are strikingly similar to those coming out of Syria now — parents dead in the street alongside their children, piles of casualties stacked in trucks, a young woman crying over the bodies of her dead family.
Abdulla was 6 years old.
The family spent four years living in the camp on Turkey's southeastern border near Syria and Iraq, where Kurdish refugees suffered shootings, sexual assaults and poisoned bread, until they came to the U.S. under the refugee resettlement program.
Today, Abdulla is a founding member and the director of community outreach at Valor Collegiate Academies, a network of college preparatory charter schools in South Nashville. She won the White House Champions of Change award in 2013 for her work helping educate new Americans.
The 34-year-old has been a Nashvillian for over 20 years, ever since her parents first fell in love with Middle Tennessee.
What's a terrorist?
Abdulla first learned the word terrorist in Fargo, N.D., a few years after the family moved there from the refugee camp in 1992.
On April 19, 1995, a young white man from New York conspired to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Authorities initially questioned some men described as Middle Eastern, according to news reports at the time.
Timothy McVeigh would later be convicted for the bombing. But in the wake of the attack, some of Abdulla's classmates associated her with the destruction.
Who are Nashville's Kurds?
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► The professor: From Kurdish refugee who spoke no English to distinguished TSU faculty
► The ethnobotanist: Kurd on a mission to preserve her culture
"What is a terrorist?" she remembers asking her teacher. "Everybody keeps calling me a terrorist."
In 1996, the family moved to Nashville. They were attracted by the sense of community, the values and the volunteerism.
"We believed what the Statue of Liberty said, the myth of the American dream," she said.
Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Abdulla, like most Americans, remembers exactly where she was and what she was doing when she learned two planes had struck the twin towers. She'd just finished her freshman year studying sociology at Tennessee State University and was checking out books at the school library. Everyone was watching the television screens in the lobby, where footage of the attack and images of the suspects' faces were on replay.
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And then all eyes were on her standing there in a hijab, silent and glaring. The librarian slammed the books down as she scanned them. Abdulla asked what had happened.
“Well, don’t you know?” she remembers the woman asking. “Your people did it.”
American amnesia
Many say xenophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric are getting worse, sometimes with dangerous consequences. According to a Pew Research poll in January, 76 percent of Americans said discrimination against Muslims in the U.S. is on the rise, and a study by the Arab American Institute a month earlier found that favorable attitudes toward American Muslims have declined since 2010.
“We are forgetful," Abdulla explained. "America has always been suffering from amnesia. We go from being oppressed yesterday to being the oppressors today.”
While there was a national backlash against Muslims in the wake of 9/11, Abdulla said she still felt safe. Professors asked Abdulla if she needed anything. Friends offered to walk her to her car.
But a second major wave of backlash after President Barack Obama was re-elected and the increasing mistrust and hatred she said the Kurds have been experiencing since the rise of President Donald Trump have forced her to be more careful and alert.
When she and her husband were looking to buy a house, they had to think about how their children would be received at the local schools. They wondered, what would happen if Abdulla, who chooses to wear a hijab, joined her children for a neighborhood bike ride?
“Most people are focused on Trump, but it’s a bigger problem," she said. "It’s an American problem.”
After the executive order banning refugees and all legal travel from a number of Muslim majority countries, Abdulla went to the Salahadeen Center. There, she joined men and women who sat in folding chairs asking a panel of immigration and civil rights lawyers what to do. Abdulla walked around the room, translating questions for the panel as her husband chased after their toddler. The mood was tense, and she worked hard to help each person who asked.
A woman's fiance was locked out of the country. A man was habitually harassed at airports. Another needed to visit family members abroad. What should they do?
Before her 1-year-old was born, before such questions needed asking, Abdulla took a therapeutic trip with her husband and their other two children to Kurdistan for the first time in two decades. They stopped by the refugee camp where Abdulla's mother once learned to make purses out of potato sacks to sell the Turks in exchange for soap.
Afterward, her eldest daughter emptied her piggy bank to give all her money to the Syrian refugees, the latest "homeless, tempest-tossed" beckoned by the Statue of Liberty to a country Abdulla said many have forgotten was founded by immigrants.