BAGHDAD, 31 December 2005 — A 16-year-old from Florida who traveled to Iraq on his own without telling his parents was put on a flight home yesterday, the US Embassy said, while warning Americans of the dangers of undertaking similar journeys.
Farris Hassan, of Fort Lauderdale, had been under the care of the US Embassy after being on his own in Iraq for several days.
Hassan, a junior at Pine Crest School, a prep academy of about 700 students in Fort Lauderdale, recently studied immersion journalism — a writer who lives the life of his subject in order to better understand it.
The teenager, whose parents were born in Iraq but have lived in the United States for about 35 years, says he wanted to travel to Baghdad to better understand what Iraqis are living through. “I thought I’d go the extra mile for that, or rather, a few thousand miles,” he told The Associated Press.
Skipping a week of school, he left the country on Dec. 11, telling only two high school friends of his plans. His travels took him to Kuwait and Lebanon before he arrived in Iraq on Christmas Day.
Hassan’s mother, Shatha Atiya, said she offered to take her son to Iraq later, when tensions eased, but he was not satisfied. He left without telling her, and sent an e-mail after his departure, Atiya said.
The teen traveled to Kuwait, where a taxi dropped him in the desert at the Iraq border, but he could not cross there because of tightened security ahead of the Iraqi parliamentary elections on Dec. 15. He went to Beirut to stay with family friends, and flew from there to Baghdad.
Unable to speak Arabic, the dangers of his predicament began to dawn on him when he went out of his hotel looking for food and had to pull out his phrase book. “And I’m like, ‘well, I should probably be going.’ It was not a safe place. The way they were looking at me kind of freaked me out,” he said.
After his second night in Baghdad, he contacted the AP and said he had come to do research and humanitarian work. The AP called the US Embassy, which sent US soldiers to pick him up.
State Department officials notified his parents, and assured Atiya that her son was in Baghdad’s US-protected Green Zone, where he would be safer than in the sector where he first contacted journalists.
Michael Buckwald, a 17-year-old classmate, said Hassan immerses himself in subjects that he likes and was opinionated in class.
Hassan said he understood how dangerous his trip was. He said his plans on his return to Florida were to “kiss the ground and hug everyone.”
