by Derek Cassoff

Fadi Fadel back in Montreal. The humanitarian aid worker, who had spent time in the Philippines, Vancouver and Sri Lanka, was drawn to post-war Iraq. “I looked at it as a golden opportunity to introduce the concept of human rights where there was none and to do real community building from scratch.” Photo by Linda Rutenberg

Trouble had started to brew in the Iraqi city of Najaf on April 4. It was a Sunday afternoon and about 5,000 demonstrators swelled into the city’s narrow streets to protest the detention of a leading cleric’s top aide. The demonstrations turned violent when gunmen in the crowd opened fire on a garrison housing Spanish troops. Coalition forces and Iraqi police officers, backed by Apache attack helicopters, returned fire, killing at least 20 protesters and wounding hundreds more.

By nightfall, pandemonium engulfed the city’s streets and local bandits began ransacking police stations. Najaf’s Western aid workers, who just days earlier were busy rebuilding schools and running vaccination clinics, quickly packed their belongings and scurried north towards the relative safety of Baghdad.

One aid worker remained, however. Having fallen behind in his paperwork, Fadi Fadel, attendee 98, decided to hunker down in his guesthouse. With an Arabic name and a dark complexion, Fadel figured he’d be fine. “Safer than the blond people I worked with,” he would later say.

It was close to 11 p.m. on April 6 when Fadel’s nightmare began. He was dozing off in bed when a barking dog startled him. Scampering over to the front window, he saw several gunmen engaged in a heated conversation with the guards at his compound. Moments later, the gunmen burst into the house and pounced on Fadel, demanding to see his passport. He was blindfolded, had his hands tied behind his back, and was ushered into a waiting car.

Fadel would spend the next two days bound and blindfolded in an underground cell. His captors routinely beat him with a garden hose and burned his back and forehead with lit cigarettes. During his second day of captivity, he was seated in front of a video camera and, at gunpoint, ordered to state that he was an Israeli spy.

It would be another eight days before Fadel would taste freedom. By then his plight had been broadcast around the world. He came to symbolize the fate that awaited Westerners who dared venture into Iraq, even to do humanitarian work, in the chaotic months following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Yet weeks after his safe return to Canada, Fadel, 33, had no regrets about his decision to assist in the country’s rebuilding. It was a mission he felt compelled to undertake, an opportunity for an Arab man with a passion for human rights to do a bit of good in a corner of the world desperately in need.

Dashed dreams

Fadi Fadel was 19 when, in 1990, his parents uprooted the family from their native Damascus, Syria, to come to Canada. “My parents felt that they could not give us the level of comfort and freedom in Syria they thought we deserved,” Fadel says. The family settled in suburban Montreal and began their pursuit of the Canadian Dream. Fadel enrolled in a computer science program at Concordia.

But things didn’t work out as planned. A year after their arrival, Fadel’s parents discovered, by chance, that he was gay — a fact that did not sit well in the household. Fadel ran away from home, dropped out of school and spent the next two years on his own. He worked as a prostitute in Montreal’s Gay Village to make ends meet.

But as dire as his situation had become, Fadel was even more disturbed by what he witnessed around him: teenaged prostitutes living in unimaginable squalor, subject to abuse and sexual exploitation. He was so moved, he began volunteering at community organizations, handing out condoms, clean syringes and words of advice to street kids. The professional counsellors he worked with told Fadel he had an aptitude for helping others and encouraged him to return to school for formal training. In 1993, he entered Concordia’s Department of Applied Social Sciences (now Applied Human Sciences), taking such classes as family communication, life-span growth and development, and interpersonal communication and relationships. “It was part learning, part therapy,” he says. “I was developing new skills but was applying them to my own life at the same time.”

He also took a year-long, six-credit course in community development, in which students spend the academic year studying a Montreal neighbourhood. In the poverty-stricken Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district, Fadel again came face to face with destitute families. “That course was the best training you can get in community development,” he says. By the end of the year, he knew he wanted to devote his career to helping children. “It was there that I realized what I wanted to do with my life.”

In the spring of 1998, six elective credits shy of graduation, Fadel accepted a nine-month contract through Canada’s Foreign Affairs department to travel to the Philippines to study child trafficking. In the country’s northern jungles, poor tribal families routinely sell their children to international traders. “The people live in such poverty and ignorance they really don’t know what’s going on when these guys come to town offering money,” Fadel explains.

Upon his return to Canada, he spent three years working in Vancouver with Save the Children, an international organization that runs programs aimed at helping at-risk kids. He spearheaded a project that built awareness and prevention programs to curb the sexual exploitation of aboriginal youth. That was followed by a posting to Sri Lanka.

By the beginning of 2003, Fadel had moved back home, his family beginning to come to grips with his homosexuality. By now his attention had begun to shift to Iraq, which was on the verge of being invaded by a U.S.-led coalition force intent on removing Saddam Hussein from power. Even before the start of the war, Fadel envisioned himself heading to the country in a humanitarian capacity. “I speak the language. I know the culture. I’m a proud Canadian, but I am also proud of my Arab heritage,” he says.

When the first volley of cruise missiles fell on Baghdad, Fadel was watching the story develop on television with his family. It was then that he decided to share his plans with his parents. “They thought I was crazy and they were worried for me,” he says. “But I wasn’t thinking of the danger, I was thinking more of the excitement and of being a part of history. I felt that I needed to be involved.”

Fadel placed his name on a national roster of humanitarian aid workers, hoping to get involved in the reconstruction effort sure to follow the war. After several months he was contacted by the International Rescue Committee, a New York-based organization that has dispatched aid workers to such trouble spots as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The group launched its Iraq mission in May 2003, shortly after U.S. president George W. Bush declared an end to hostilities.

Fadel left Canada this February for what was to be a 10-month tour of duty in Najaf, whose mainly Shiite population had suffered from years of oppression under Hussein’s rule. He and his colleagues were warmly received by the local population upon their arrival, and he made a point of visiting many of the city’s leading clerics, some of whom had even issued a fatwa, or religious edict, asking their congregants to support the work of Western relief agencies. Fadel says, “I never felt threatened and I was convinced that we were safe.”

That is, until the night of April 6, when he was roused out of bed by a band of gunmen intent on using him as a pawn in a game of international brinkmanship.

Making peace with death

Fadi Fadel, left, with a new Iraqi army officer in Najaf, Iraq, last February. As an aid worker he distributed wheelchairs to wounded children, handed out medications and oversaw the reconstruction of the city’s schools, health clinics and sanitation system.

There were several times during his captivity that Fadel was certain he was going to be killed. Though at that point civilian aid workers in Iraq had been spared the worst of the violence, Najaf had become a centre of resistance, fuelled by the anti-Western rhetoric of the unpredictable Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. During the initial days of his ordeal, Fadel was routinely threatened by his captors, who told him several times that he would be executed once they had no more use for him. Fadel and three other hostages were crammed into a small concrete cell, served three small meals a day, and kept under the watchful eyes of armed men, even when using the washroom. Fadel says he spent most of his time praying. “I had a lot of time to think,” he recalls, “and, at one point, I made my peace with death. I accepted the fact that I was helpless and that my life was in the hands of these people. Somehow, that got me through the kidnapping.”

It was on the tenth day of his captivity that Fadel was told he was to be freed. Even then, he figured that his captors merely planned to put him at ease before killing him. Instead, he was driven to a large cemetery, where he was handed over to a group representing a local cleric. They drove him to an office in Najaf, where a media horde had assembled to greet his release.

Fadel returned to Canada five days later, only to be greeted by yet another media circus. CNN called three times, CBS’s 60 Minutes interviewed him for a longer piece on the Iraqi conflict, and Radio-Canada will air a one-hour documentary on his adventure this fall. He was invited to Ottawa for a private 15-minute meeting with Canadian prime minister Paul Martin, followed by a lunch with some of the politicians and foreign affairs bureaucrats who had worked behind the scenes to secure his release.

But if his experience in Iraq put a dent in his humanitarian plans, it was only a temporary one; two months after his tearful homecoming, Fadel was back on a plane, heading to Sri Lanka to help in the rebuilding of yet another troubled nation.

“I was itching to get back to work,” he says. “I have a passion for advocacy and for promoting human rights, and that is what I want to do.”


Derek Cassoff, BA (journ.) 93, is a Montreal writer.

For more information on the International Rescue Committee, visit theirc.org.