.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} The husband was an engineer married to a college-educated wife with two elementary age children. The Iraqi couple couldn’t afford to buy helmets or protective gear. They were translators for the U.S. Army. They braved snipers and roadside bombs to patrol with soldiers. One night, they found an envelope containing a bullet on their stoop.

Everyone in the Basra neighborhood knew how to read this signal from the Muslim extremists. It meant that within 24 hours the Iraqi couple would be murdered along with their two children, punishment for associating with Americans.

“They sold the few possessions they owned to buy transport across the Iraqi border,” Noah Merrill told the Business Record by phone from Amman, Jordan. “For the past year, they’ve lived in a two-room apartment in Jordan that smells like methane sewer gas. They applied for American visas, but Jordan can send them back to Iraq to be killed at any moment.”

Merrill is a consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, a Des Moines Quaker organization. He interviews Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan whose lives are at risk because they helped Americans. Many refugees are the sort of skilled professionals – skilled in medicine, computers and engineering with fluency in several languages – that Iowa wants. Yet they remain in legal twilight overseas.

Iowa’s Bureau of Refugee Services will allow 120 Iraqi refugees into the state by Sept. 30. Whether the federal government will process applications in time is a crucial question. Pres. George Bush set a limit of 70,000 refugees who can be allowed into the United States this year. Africans will be allowed the largest number of visas, 22,000, and 7,000 will be allotted to the 1.5 million displaced Iraqis.

The backlog of visa applications from refugees is staggering. Des Moines immigration attorney Ta-Yu Yang says hundreds of Nicaraguan and Salvadoran immigrants in Iowa applied for asylum in the 1980s, when death squads and war were rampant in their homelands. “They still haven’t gotten an interview with the State Department,” Yang said.

The Central Americans fleeing political violence entered the United States illegally or arrived on work or tourist visas. Yang helped some clients apply for visa extensions to avoid being sent back to the war zones.

To request political asylum, a person must be standing on United States soil. With the fall of Saigon imminent in 1975, Vietnamese frantically tried to get inside the U.S. embassy, because U.S. embassies are considered part of the United States. With North Vietnamese troops approaching their city, applying for visas rather than asylum would have been futile.

California-based Titan Corp. completed a five-year, $4.6 billion Pentagon contract to provide translators for U.S. troops. According to Titan, since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, 257 Iraqi interpreters have been killed, mostly by assassination. Weekly pay for a translator is about $270.

An American citizen must sponsor each refugee’s visa application. Army Reserve Sgt. Shelaine Tuytschaevers of Cumming and her mother, Des Moines Area Community College instructor Rosalyn Harbart, have spent over a year trying to get visas for three Iraqi translators who worked for Tuytschaevers’ unit.

“These translators, two brothers and a sister, are Christians, putting them at even more risk with extremists,” Harbart said. “My daughter says translators saved soldiers’ lives with their advice, defused tense situations and could win the locals’ trust.”

Harbart understands there are security concerns about issuing visas to Iraqis. Homeland Security must determine who is hostile toward the United States. But translators get background checks before being contracted to work with soldiers. Mimi Sanford, an aide to U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, is helping track the trio’s applications. One brother’s visa is in peril because his first and last names were accidentally transposed on an ID issued by a Jordanian agency.

Sanford said U.S. officials told the brother he must now produce several forms of identification, “which may be hard since he had to leave Iraq with no time to grab anything.”

The brothers are college-educated engineers who each speak three languages and have a U.S. military veteran championing them. When asked about the delay, Harbart fell silent, then finally said: “I really believe the reason is political. If Iraqi translators flow into the United States because their lives are in danger, the Bush administration would feel it was an admission its Iraq policy had failed.”

Yang believes politics, not the letter of the law, is why Cubans arriving illegally in Miami on rickety boats normally get political asylum while Haitian illegals arriving on rafts are regularly returned to violence-plagued Haiti. “The United States opposes Castro and Cuban-Americans have more political clout than Haitians,” he said with a sigh.

Iowa is one of the few states with its own refugee bureau to help new arrivals find jobs and housing.The Iowa Bureau of Refugee Services was created in 1979, an offshoot of former Gov. Robert Ray’s resettlement of Vietnamese refugees. More than 25,800 refugees from across the world live in Iowa.

“Iowans should be proud of their compassion,” Yang said. “Iowa accepts proportionately more refugees than most states.”

Iowans boosted Merrill’s spirits in May when he described the refugees’ plight to Des Moines and Iowa City groups. “The response was thrilling,” Merrill said. “Legal and medical professionals in the audience offered help.”

Merrill and United Nations researchers post refugees’ interviews at electroniciraq.net. The Web site depicts experiences so bizarre, they might seem as unreal to Americans as life on planet Neptune.

Doctors, nurses, electricians, gardeners and accountants are targeted by militias because these jobs were deemed tainted by Western influence.

Youssef Jabry, 32, and his brother, Muhammad, 20, supported their parents in Baghdad and put two younger brothers through college by singing at birthday parties and weddings. Sometimes, they took requests and sang pop songs. A militia kidnapped Muhammad and decapitated him. A note on his corpse warned it was punishment for singing “satanic American” music. The Iraqi Artists Association said 75 Iraqi singers have been murdered since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Jabry is scrounging money to get his family to Jordan where they will file visa applications.