An Iraqi journalist on the Washington Post Metro desk
Not your average intern: Omar Fekeiki offered help to an American reporter in Baghdad and found a career.
from the August 23, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
But a few days later, when pressed, he admitted that hearing about Mr. Hassan's death had made him wonder: How could I have survived?
His answer is that he's fortunate. And maybe, in a way, he's right. He is here, in the United States – halfway through his master's degree; at the Post for the summer, where, on his first assignment as an intern, President Bush made an unexpected appearance at the dedication of a memorial; and, where, much to the puzzlement of other interns, Post chairman Donald Graham occasionally seeks him out to chat. Fekeiki attended Utah's glitzy Sundance Film Festival last winter for a screening of the Iraq documentary "No End in Sight," in which he appears.
He is alive, when so many others are not.
Fekeiki's path to the Post was serendipitous. On April 17, 2003, eight days after Saddam Hussein's government fell, he spotted Mary Beth Sheridan, a Post reporter, trying to conduct an interview outside the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad. He asked if she needed help. At Al-Turath University College Fekeiki had majored in English. "But she was the first American I'd ever spoken to," he says. (Though before Ms. Sheridan there was the Oprah Winfrey Show: "That was my first window to the US; it's because of Oprah that I know how to talk to Americans.")
Not long after meeting Sheridan, who was impressed by his language skills, Fekeiki was hired by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, then the Post's Baghdad bureau chief. Like so many who meet Fekeiki, Mr. Chandrasekaran was won over. "Omar just has that effect on people," he says. Chandrasekaran has been Fekeiki's mentor and champion, supporting his application to Berkeley and raising scholarship funds when he was accepted. Fekeiki was a groomsman in his wedding. In terms of temperament, Chandrasekaran says, "It's not to say he doesn't have his bad days and moments of sadness, but he may be the most ebullient, optimistic Iraqi I've ever encountered."
There is a slim pamphlet composed of brief autobiographies handed out to all the new interns, a way of acquainting them with one another. Most are breezy and glib, the work of young journalists facile with words and keenly aware of their audience. Fekeiki's reads a little differently:
I was born and raised in a Baghdad family that appreciated and practiced writing, but I never thought I'd become a journalist, because I lived under a dictatorship. To me, it was a taboo profession because the only thing journalists did under the regime of Saddam Hussein was to praise the government and lie to the people.
He comes from a family of professionals: doctors, engineers, a father who was foreign editor for the Iraqi news agency. He worries sometimes that he'll never see them again. His parents, two brothers, the niece whom he named – all are still in Baghdad.
***
Four years after he first met her in front of the Palestine Hotel, he is working with Sheridan again, on a story about the effort by Washington residents to secure voting rights in Congress.
Fekeiki arrives 30 minutes early to a demonstration planned for noon. He takes a seat along Constitution Avenue, the Capitol on his left. This is a luxury – the chance to arrive early, to linger.
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