Unearthed Trauma and Double Standards Regarding the DC Insurrection

Smoke covering Baghdad, Iraq on April 2nd, 2003.

This past Wednesday (January 6^th) was a day that many Americans will never forget. It was one of those defining moments in time, where years later you recall where you were and how you felt as you watched the events unfolding. However, in my case those events unearthed a range of buried emotions and past trauma, the sort of thoughts one must let out, as they eat away at you if you imprison them within your head.

To set the scene, at midday I had decided to take a break from work and do my usual 6-mile afternoon run—a ritual I developed years ago, which acts as my daily ‘therapy’ session with nature and my own body. Unfortunately, on my second mile as I jogged along while enjoying my music, my serenity was interrupted with a stream of blaring police sirens.

Now living in DC, I am used to the usual sirens that come with living in the nation’s capital, but the magnitude of these were different, and much louder because of their high number. The kind of difference between sitting next to one screaming child on an airplane versus thirty at once. As a result, my dormant PTSD symptoms were immediately triggered and I was shaken to my core in a fight-or-flight survival stance, that I thought I had exiled to my mental recesses. That trauma was derived from growing up in war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan and experiencing frequent nearby explosions and being surrounded by the constant fear that at any moment, your “normal” day could be turned into a hell on earth of fire and scattered body parts. 

I was soon met with a series of vague text messages coming from my former students and residents asking if I was running near the National Mall, my preferred location. But none of them had offered the exact details of what had occurred, which again created a flurry of thoughts in my psyche. Had there been a terrorist attack? A mass shooting? A suicide or car bombing like the ones I remember as a young child from back in my homeland? Of note, giving someone who has buried trauma limited details in such situations can be the worst option of all, as their traumatized imagination will immediately harken back to those memories and fill in the void with the worst possible options.

All of the sudden I was not jogging along a nice path with well groomed grass amidst white marble buildings, but I was a frightened young girl running along a dusty dirt road in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm who thought that the quicker I moved the less of a target I would be. All of the sudden I was also that child of mass exodus living in a sanctioned country without enough to survive, whose family fled to the sheltering mountains to escape mass murder from Saddam Hussein’s regime.

When you grow up in a country of constant conflict and have witnessed starvation, and the widespread looting and mobs that form out of a means to survive, you never forget the look in the eyes of uncontrolled masses who begin to move like a force of energy. But that sort of chaos is supposed to happen in faraway “exotic” places, the countries most Americans cannot name or find on a map, the scary places that end in “stan”, or that have important resources that need to be “liberated” by Western Governments from the dictators who rule over them.

The smoky skylines and shouts of angry mobs was something I grew up with, but now it was here. It had found me in my sanctuary of Washington DC, decades later, and I immediately began to notice the similarities and drastic differences of such an event. The most obvious one was the relative privilege of the rioters, in comparison to the people of true desperation I remembered growing up. In my experience, charging into a public building and breaking windows was either communal rage because fathers could not feed their hungry children, or because oppressed minority populations had reached their breaking point and were tired of having family members being picked up by secret police, and disappeared or murdered—never to be seen again.

“Oppression” to my younger self, meant being a Kurd in a nation where my language was banned, and where it was an official state policy to carry out genocide on my people during the Al-Anfal campaign. Once you survive an event where 180,000 of your fellow ethnic group are shot, gassed, and buried alive in the desert, seeing middle-class Americans shout about the tyranny of twitter blocks, or being made to wear a mask during a health pandemic, start to feel absurd, comical, and insulting.

As a refugee who escaped a warzone and came to the US as a teenager, seeing this mob charge into the American capitol building with rage in their eyes was a puzzling experience. I had experienced real persecution under Saddam, so when they shout into the news cameras about “tyranny” because Costco doesn’t want them openly coughing on other customers, you realize that some people do not realize how good they have it.

I also realized how a “brown girl” from the Middle East like myself, lives in a different universe than many of these rioters who want to burn this great nation down. I was raised to always be grateful for the opportunity that America had given me and to hold my tongue on criticizing her because any imperfections were outweighed by the life I had been given the chance to earn. I had to always be on my best behavior, study the hardest, dress the most professionally, and be everything that many Americans did not expect, when they complimented me on my English upon finding out I was “from Iraq”.

But, within these rioters I did not see faces that reminded me of myself, but rather a mob of rage that likely viewed someone like me as a “threat” or unwelcomed “immigrant”. Many of them likely did not like the religion I grew up with, and likely had an idea that the people I grew up around were all “terrorists”. Yet here they were, terrorizing the elected representatives of their own Government, forcing them to run into hideouts, while others were shot and trampled to death.

And I then wondered, what would the reaction had been if this mob was a group of Muslims or Black Lives Matter protestors? How would these same people react or what would they say? I would guess that it would be some version of “the police should just shoot them all”. Yet they were punching cops, chasing them up stairs, and beating one to death. They were clearly carrying out domestic terrorism, but would they be viewed as terrorists? Or would this be another incident where the media would tell us about how they were driven to do this after being pillars of the community. Their past arrests would not be the headline, but their past community service would be.

And as the stories began to roll, there it was. What I saw was a mix of excuses and justifications. The President even called them “special” people, the very people storming his own government buildings. Luckily, I have also witnessed a needed shift in the way the media has started to cover this situation. Many Americans are now realizing that terrorism comes in many forms, and especially racial colors and religions. It is not a term for “foreigner”, but the terrorists can live right here among us and look more like an “American” than an “other”. It can be a lot to digest during an afternoon run, but all I can do is keep jogging.