{"id":1517,"date":"2008-01-02T13:57:12","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T21:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=1517"},"modified":"2008-01-02T13:57:12","modified_gmt":"2008-01-02T21:57:12","slug":"wsj-stresses-from-iraqi-fathers-disappearance-strike-family-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2008\/01\/02\/wsj-stresses-from-iraqi-fathers-disappearance-strike-family-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"WSJ: Stresses From Iraqi Father&#8217;s Disappearance Strike Family Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is from my good friend and Columbia classmate, Sarmad Ali, who has written a <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB119906451512158679.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today\">follow-up piece<\/a> to his <a href=\"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=1246\">story<\/a> from last February.<i><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I wasn&#8217;t there in Baghdad; I couldn&#8217;t be there. I am an Iraqi citizen caught between two worlds. I&#8217;m a guest in the U.S., where I have lived since 2004, studying and working for this newspaper. But I have no U.S. travel documents. And my Iraqi passport has been invalidated.<\/p>\n<p>More unsettling, more disruptive than the possibility of my father&#8217;s death has been the uncertainty about his fate. I mourn close friends who have been killed in Baghdad&#8217;s violence, but sometimes I envy their families for being able to bury their loved ones.<\/p>\n<p>My experience &#8212; the distance and uncertainty that corrupt my ability to grieve &#8212; isn&#8217;t unique. Many people have fled Baghdad and left family behind to survive in a war zone in which people go missing and casualties are often unidentifiable.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past year, my relatives in Baghdad have continued to look for my father without me, his oldest son. I have grown more distant from them, and strains between us have deepened.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is from my good friend and Columbia classmate, Sarmad Ali, who has written a follow-up piece to his story from last February. I wasn&#8217;t there in Baghdad; I couldn&#8217;t be there. I am an Iraqi citizen caught between two worlds. I&#8217;m a guest in the U.S., where I have lived since 2004, studying and working for this newspaper. But I have no U.S. travel documents. And my Iraqi passport has been invalidated. More unsettling, more disruptive than the possibility&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[65,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-foreign-affairs","category-iraq","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-ot","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}