Two hundred and fifty years is a long time for any nation. But anniversaries have a way of making you think not about the country’s age but about your own relationship with it and when exactly that relationship became real.

For me, it became real over a ticket.

I was working as a manufacturing engineer at ICON Health and Fitness in Logan, Utah. The company made treadmills and ellipticals, and I spent my days on the production floor troubleshooting assembly lines, doing what engineers do. It was my first engineering job, which I had taken just a few months after finishing my bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. I had arrived in the United States in 1997 as a political refugee, processed through the UNHCR in Ankara, Turkey, and Logan came later, a small city in northern Utah that I had ended up in because of that job. I was, as far as anyone knew, the only Kurd in town, which made me a kind of rare specimen in the eyes of my colleagues. They were curious, mostly kind, and overwhelmingly Mormon.

The warmth of Mormon communities often surprises people who have never spent time among them. It surprised me too, but in the best way. These were people who genuinely believed in looking after their neighbors, and they extended that to me without hesitation.

In 2003, after years of paperwork, appointments, and waiting, the agency that was then the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, made it official. I was an American citizen. I had an alien number that had defined me for years, and now I had something more. When I came into work after the ceremony, my colleagues and management congratulated me warmly, sincerely. Many of them told me they had never known anyone who had gone through naturalization before. They did not quite know what the process involved, but they understood it mattered.

The event was only a couple of years after September 11th. My colleagues had witnessed something during that period that stayed with me. Someone had gone through the Yellow Pages, picking out foreign-sounding names and calling to threaten people with death in their voice. That kind of ugliness exists everywhere. But the people I worked with in Logan were nothing like that. They were the ones who had stood by me when it happened, and they were the ones now shaking my hand and asking what it had felt like to finally become a citizen.

The Herald Journal, Logan’s local paper, had come to interview me around that time. The story they ran was titled “Escape to Utah,” and it felt like an accurate description of what had happened, even if the word “escape” did not quite capture how much I had come to love where I had landed.

The following Fourth of July, the first one I would celebrate as a citizen, the management at ICON did something I did not expect. They gifted me a ticket to the town’s Independence Day celebration, held at a large stadium. The celebration was something you normally paid to attend, and they handed me a ticket without me asking, without any fanfare, just as a gesture. You are one of us now. Come celebrate with us.

I went. I sat in that stadium and watched the fireworks and listened to the music and felt something I had spent most of my life not feeling. I felt like I belonged somewhere.

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That probably sounds simple to someone who has always had a country. But I had grown up a Kurd in Iraq, which meant growing up as something the country around you does not quite recognize, a foreigner in the only place you have ever known. When I left in the 1990s, I was not leaving a home. I was leaving a place that had never really claimed me.

America claimed me. Not through the document the INS issued, though that mattered too. It claimed me through a ticket handed over by people who had decided I was worth celebrating.

Two hundred and fifty years in, that is still what this country is capable of. I have not forgotten it.

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October 19, 2005. I was in Baghdad when history walked into a courtroom, and I was watching it on CNN.

I had been offered a seat in the observer’s box. I turned it down, not for lack of access, and not out of fear. The day before, I had been part of an official inspection team that toured that same courthouse inside Baghdad’s Green Zone. I had sat in the very seat they were offering me, looked through the bulletproof glass that separated the observers from where the accused would stand, and taken it all in. I knew the room. I just couldn’t bring myself to be inside it for that moment.

I am a Kurd, born in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and the regime facing judgment that day was not some distant political chapter for me. It had shaped my life directly and had cost my people enormously, in blood, in displacement, and in a generational grief that doesn’t have a clean ending. By the time I reached Baghdad, I had spent months sitting with survivors in Portland and Seattle, listening as they described what happened to them, and I wasn’t sure I could hold all of that together in the same room as the man responsible for it. So I watched from a distance, on CNN, and let the moment land the way it needed to.

What I haven’t shared until now is the full picture of why I was there at all.

I arrived in Baghdad in September 2005 on a 90-day mission that was, in scope, much broader than any single role. I was there as part of the U.S. government’s wider effort to support the stabilization of post-invasion Iraq, a mission that touched everything from institutional reconstruction to legal accountability and that placed people with specific expertise inside a web of agencies working, often under considerable pressure, to build functioning structures from the wreckage of a collapsed state. One significant part of my mission was embedded within the Regime Crimes Liaison Office, the RCLO, a unit established by the U.S. Department of Justice to support the Iraqi High Tribunal in prosecuting Saddam Hussein and the senior architects of his Ba’ath regime. But the RCLO was one thread of a much larger tapestry, and it’s important to say that from the start.

Within the RCLO, my role was as a language and cultural analyst. That title understates what the work actually required. Yes, I was translating documents, but much more than that, I was helping investigators understand what they were looking at. The geography of specific military operations. The cultural logic behind how Ba’athist forces moved through Kurdish territory and why certain villages were targeted in the sequence they were. The meaning carried by particular words and phrases that only someone who had lived inside that world could accurately read. I had that background because I had lived it. I came to the United States in 1997 as a political refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan. The regime I was now helping to document was the same one that had made leaving the only viable option.

The groundwork had begun before I ever set foot in Iraq. In Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, cities that had become home to large Kurdish refugee communities, I spent time sitting with survivors of the 1988 Halabja chemical attack and the Anfal campaign. These were people who had lived through events that the world has still not fully reckoned with. Halabja remains the largest chemical weapons attack on a civilian population in recorded history, with mustard gas and nerve agents dropped on a city, killing up to five thousand people within hours. The Anfal campaign, the broader military operation of which Halabja was the most visible atrocity, killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds. In those rooms in the Pacific Northwest, survivors walked me through maps, pointed to where their villages had stood, and told me what they saw and heard and smelled on the days that changed everything. What came out of those conversations didn’t stay in those rooms.

There is something I want to say here that has not been said publicly before. The Kurdish genocide cases, Halabja and Anfal, were the strongest cases in the RCLO’s arsenal. Everyone inside the process knew it. The evidentiary foundation was overwhelming, and a conviction on those charges alone would have determined the outcome of the trials. But they were not the first cases brought to trial. The deliberate decision to open proceedings with the Dujail case, concerning the killing and torture of Shia Arab civilians following an assassination attempt in 1982, was not purely a matter of legal strategy. It was a political calculation and one I was aware of through my position. The reasoning was that prosecuting an Arab Sunni leader first on charges of Kurdish genocide risked inflaming ethnic and sectarian fractures in an Iraq that was already dangerously unstable. Justice was being ordered around political survival. I understood the logic. It didn’t make it easier to sit with.

But 2005 was not where my story with this regime began, and that’s what I’ll leave you with for now.

In the mid-1990s, I was part of something that was covert and that has only ever been partially surfaced in public. Former CIA officer Robert Baer touched on it in his book See No Evil. I was not the architect. I was not the one giving orders or setting strategy. But I was there, in a role that mattered, one whose absence would have been felt. That story is for another installment, when I’m ready to tell it fully.

What I will say is this: by the time I landed in Baghdad in September 2005, more than a decade of my life had been quietly pointed in that direction. I watched the opening of the trial on CNN, from a room in the same city where it was happening, and it felt like the only honest place I could be.

This is the first in a series of personal accounts from inside efforts that shaped one of the most consequential chapters in recent history. Future installments will go deeper into the 1995 covert operation, the Anfal evidence process, what it meant to walk through places in Baghdad that almost no one else had seen, and what carrying all of these memories looks like when you’re a Kurd who once had no choice but to leave.

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