Yahya Salih hasn’t lived in Iraq for 30 years, but even during times of war and other upheavals in his homeland, he’s maintained a connection. In 1994, he returned to find a bride whom he brought back to San Francisco, where Salih runs an acclaimed restaurant that serves food rooted in Iraqi culture.
Sitting in the entranceway of Yaya Cuisine on a recent day, Salih talked optimistically about his business and his family - the Salihs have three children now - though he was pessimistic about Iraq. Nearly every week, Salih speaks by phone with relatives there. A brother-in-law was recently killed by gangsters. Salih’s brother has been threatened with death by a militant group unless he hands over $10,000. The group has also threatened this brother’s children, all of whom are in hiding. Many of Salih’s relatives in Iraq plead with him to arrange a visa for them to the United States.
“My sister told me, ‘Please - we’d pay anything, just we want to get out of Iraq,’ ” Salih said.
For Iraqi Americans in the Bay Area, the misery in Iraq is always present in their lives, even if the war zone is 7,000 miles away. Salih and others do what they can, whether it’s sending money back home or starting a nonprofit organization that benefits Iraq. They can also do something here that in Iraq might be deadly: Reach out to Iraqis of different religions. In the Bay Area, Iraqi Americans who are Shiite, Sunni, Christian and even Jewish interact with regularity - the sort of commingling that once existed in Iraq.
Like many things having to do with Iraq, this commingling is complicated. Often, it happens on special occasions, as in 2005 when Iraqi Americans voted in polling stations for an interim Iraqi government, and Muslim, Christian and Jewish Iraqis shared in the opportunity to elect members of Iraq’s Parliament. Beyond these formal gatherings, there are the impromptu meetings like the one that Elias Shamash had a few years ago at Kinko’s on Van Ness Avenue.
Shamash, a Jewish Iraqi who grew up in Baghdad and has lived in the Bay Area since 1978, was at the San Francisco Kinko’s when he noticed the clerk wore a name tag that said “Bassam.” “I said, ‘Where are you from?’ And he said, ‘Baghdad.’ I said, ‘Come on, I’m from Baghdad, too. When did you leave Iraq?’ He said, ‘1970' - the same year as me. He is Muslim. We became friends. ... I tell him I have a restaurant. He brought his wife to eat. They’re nice people. They’re friendly.”
Iraqi Muslims in the Bay Area are shocked to meet Shamash. He says he’s often the first Jewish Iraqi they’ve ever encountered. Shamash, 57, had good relations with Muslims during his childhood in Baghdad, even during the late 1950s and early 1960s, when - after the establishment of Israel - Iraq’s government began cracking down on Jews and accusing them of treasonous behavior. The 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and the rise in Iraq of Saddam Hussein, led to an exodus of many of Iraq’s remaining Jews, including Shamash and his family.
Muslims and Christians who left Iraq around this time did so for different reasons - some because they, too, felt threatened by the rise of Hussein’s Baath party; some because they studied abroad and subsequently decided not to return.
Ayad al-Qazzaz came to Berkeley from Iraq in 1963 for a master’s degree, felt at home with the student activism on campus (“I left Iraq when students were striking against the government”), and stayed in the United States because of the greater opportunities in academia. He’s a longtime professor of Middle Eastern studies at Sacramento State University.
“Like many other people, the reason I stayed was not because of politics - it was the job,” al-Qazzaz said. “I could make more money, and the conditions of the job were far better. In 1969, when I was debating to make a go of it in Iraq, I would have made $50 a month there.”
In 1990, al-Qazzaz returned to Iraq as the head of a group of Arab American University graduates - one of 20 U.S. organizations that Iraq’s government invited to Baghdad. In the last days of the visit, Hussein showed up to meet the visiting Americans. Al-Qazzaz was shocked to see the Iraqi leader.
“We were about 200 people,” al-Qazzaz said. “He sat down in front. He gave a talk. And he listened very carefully to us. He was a very organized thinker. He said a few things that would give the impression that he was listening to us. After two hours, he took pictures with us. Later I said, ‘Who are we that he spent two hours with us? He’s the president.’ He practically took an individual picture with all of us. ... I’ve (always) said that one of his problems (was) that he did not understand his limits.”
A month after meeting with al-Qazzaz’s group, Hussein directed his military to invade Kuwait - an action leading to a war that, al-Qazzaz says, prompted a fresh wave of Iraqi immigration to the United States and other countries. Al-Qazzaz and Nathera Mawla, a Los Gatos real estate agent who moved here in 1963 after arriving as a student in Colorado, were among the first waves of Iraqis to find their way to the Bay Area.
Before 1970, the number of Iraqi Americans living in the greater Bay Area was fewer than 1,000, al-Qazzaz estimates. Today, thousands of Iraqi Americans live here, he says. The Persian Gulf War in 1991 led large numbers of Iraqis to immigrate to the United States (and other countries). Those who moved to the Bay Area were often drawn here because they had family here, as happened with Vic Zikoor, a San Jose civil engineer. “When we came to the states (in 1979), I wanted to be where we had family - at least for my wife - in the first couple of years,” he says. “Her uncle graduated from UC Berkeley in the 1950s, and he was from Monterey, and there were cousins in Hayward, so we decided, ‘OK, we’ll come to the Bay Area.’ ”
New arrivals might have struggled with the language and culture at first, but eventually - if not quickly - they adjusted to life in the United States. Iraqi immigrants who continue to come here find a support system in their language of choice, whether it’s Arabic, English or another tongue. Some Iraqi Americans speak the Biblical language of Aramaic, which Ashur Yoseph learned growing up.
Yoseph didn’t speak a word of English when he arrived in the United States from Iraq in 1973. The son of a man who was tortured under a Baathist regime that preceded Hussein (“He still has the scars on his back and arms to show for it”), Yoseph is an Assyrian Christian. He and his brother enrolled at Lincoln High School in San Francisco when they first arrived.
Thirty-four years later, Yoseph is a prominent San Francisco manager, trained in mechanical engineering, who helps oversee the city’s revitalization of Mission Bay and Hunter’s Point. At his office, Yoseph displays symbols of an Iraq free of Saddam Hussein. He also has an oversize copy of the Arabic ballot that he used to vote in Iraq’s 2005 election, and a color photo of Yonadam Kanna, his Assyrian Christian friend in Iraq. This summer, Yoseph wanted to return to Iraq - to the country’s north, where he was born - to celebrate his 50th birthday. From there, he would go to Baghdad, where he was raised until his teenage years.
“I made the plans,” Yoseph said. “But from Iraq, I got a call that said, ‘It’s not a good time to come.’ ”
In 2000, Yoseph did go back, to check on projects in northern Iraq that were funded by the Assyrian Aid Society of America, for which Yoseph is vice president. (Bay Area chef Narsai David is president.) The trip, he said, was surreal. Iraq’s north was then a no-fly zone patrolled by U.S. aircraft. To get there, Yoseph flew to Damascus, Syria, rode for eight hours in a cab through the desert to the Syria-Iraq border, then took a dinghy across the Tigris River into Iraq, where he was greeted by a sign that said, “Welcome to Iraqi Kurdistan.” Bodyguards accompanied Yoseph wherever he went.
“They had a lot of weapons,” Yoseph said. “When we slept at the hotel, we had bodyguards in the room next to us. I told my wife (by telephone), ‘Don’t worry - we always have bodyguards around.’ And she said, ‘Well, why do you need bodyguards? That’s what worries me.’ ”
Besides their common heritage, Iraqis in the Bay Area are united by the risks they’ve taken to leave their homeland or return to it. Elias Shamash risked his life to leave the only country he had known. Part of a Jewish family that was rooted in Iraq for centuries - possibly more than 2,000 years - Shamash escaped from Iraq in 1970 by sneaking over the border to Iran. At the time, Iraq’s Jews were being monitored by Iraq’s government. Shamash, his brothers and their father dressed as Kurdish soldiers; his sister and mother dressed in veil and abaya, the shroud-like overgarment that’s common in the Arab world. At the Iraq checkpoint, they didn’t say a word for fear they would be revealed as Jewish. Had they been caught, they probably would have been executed.
“It was unbelievable,” said Shamash, a Marin County importer. “My family was (in Iraq) for generations. We didn’t know anything but Iraq.”
Neither did the other Iraqi Americans living in the Bay Area. For them, the war in Iraq is just the latest trial to endure. Rauf Naqishbendi, a Kurdish Iraqi, was born and raised in Halabja, which Hussein’s forces bombed with chemical weapons in 1988. His father and mother suffered through the attack, and are still experiencing health effects from it.
“My father is completely blind. (Doctors) took his eyes out because they were building pressure,” said Naqishbendi, a Pacifica software engineer. “The chemical bombing messed up my mother’s spinal chord. She stoops over very badly.”
Naqishbendi, a columnist who writes regularly about Iraq and the Middle East, advocates splitting Iraq into three entities, including a Kurdish north. Those who want to see Iraq maintain its pre-war sovereignty are aghast at how fast the country has deteriorated.
“Iraq is finished,” Salih said. “The whole country is finished.”
Exacerbating this feeling of despair are the pleas from Iraqis for their family members in America to do something - anything - to influence the outcome of the war.
“We feel like we’re betraying our friends and relatives in Iraq,” Mawla said. “It’s like we are here in this country and we know what democracy is, and we should have an influence (on U.S. foreign policy in Iraq), we should have an impact on our politicians - and we don’t have that. So our friends and relatives in Iraq tell us as if we are letting them down because (they believe) we have the power to do something, and we are not doing it. We feel hopeless, hapless, and helpless.”
In the 44 years that Mawla has been in the United States, those feelings have fluctuated wildly, depending on the situation in the Middle East and the way other Americans think of Iraqis. “We became like the stock market,” she said. “When they look up to the Iraqi people, our stock goes up. When they look down, our stock does down. It depends what situation you hear on the news. We are worthless or valuable. And I’m a Christian. I really love this country. I raised my children as Americans - they don’t even speak Arabic.”
Iraqi Americans who’ve been in the United States for many years still have much to be proud of. They are accomplished and driven. Shamash is married to his high-school sweetheart, a Jewish Iraqi who fled their country 10 months after he did, and they have grown children. Zikoor has been at the helm of several Arab American organizations in the Bay Area, and hosts an Arab-oriented TV show on San Jose’s cable network. Yoseph celebrated his 50th birthday last month at his Concord house surrounded by loving friends and family. Al-Qazzaz is a tenured professor who has written books and articles. Mawla, who earned a master’s degree in fine arts, has been a top real estate agent for much of her 27 years in the business. Salih has operated a series of restaurants that have drawn raves. Naqishbendi thrives in his job as an engineer. Amer Araim, a former Iraqi diplomat and United Nations Secretariat official, now teaches at San Francisco State.
In 1975, Salih enrolled at San Francisco State and studied industrial design. He worked as a dishwasher at an Indian restaurant. Soon after that, he took a job as a cook at the Balboa Cafe, in the city’s Cow Hollow neighborhood. One day, Jeremiah Tower, then the cafe’s executive chef, brought in James Beard, who was perhaps America’s best-known culinary authority. Salih had no idea who Beard was.
“Jeremiah Tower brought in this big man,” Salih said. “When I made a special dish for him (a stuffed potato that was a mix of Middle Eastern and California cuisine) he came to me and he shook my hand. He said, ‘This is one of the best dishes I have ever had in my life.’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ After he left, everyone in the dining room said, ‘Wow. Do you know who is this man?’ I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘This is James Beard.’ I said, ‘Who is James Beard?’ They said, ‘This is one who created American culinary.’ I said, ‘Wow.’ ”
Much has changed for Salih in the United States, where he arrived with virtually no money in his pocket. When he flew back to Iraq in 1994, to his hometown of Mosul, it was to complete an arranged marriage to a woman who was a distant relative. He saw her just one time before the wedding. They were in Iraq for two weeks before they returned to the Bay Area.
“I am happy,” Salih said. “People wonder and say, ‘One time you see her and you marry? Are you crazy?’ And I say, ‘Look at the divorce rate there (in Iraq) and the divorce rate here. Over there, it’s probably not 1 percent getting divorced. Over here, it’s probably 50 percent.’ Look at me. I’m a very happy person. She’s a good wife and a good mother.”
Salih’s love for his wife and children help take his mind off the troubles in Iraq. A moment’s relief from the war is enough to keep him in good spirits.
To see video of Ashur Yoseph at his Concord home, where he celebrated his 50th birthday with friends, family and other Iraqi Americans, go to sfgate.com.
