One is fighting ISIS in Aleppo province. The other is a longtime American resident who has found himself atop an ISIS hit list.
Both are Syrian nationals who, not days into Donald Trump’s disastrous, indefinite travel ban on citizens of their war-ravaged country, are finding themselves treated like the terrorists who want them dead most of all. Both have also been invaluable sources of mine over the past six years, as well as partners of the U.S. government.
Radwan Ziadeh has been a fixture in Washington, D.C., and his home of Alexandria, Virginia, for 10 years. He first arrived in the United States in 2007, a year before Damascus issued an arrest warrant for him and he was thus able to obtain Temporary Protected Status as a refugee fleeing human rights abuse. He and his wife have since had three children, all born in the U.S.
“Congress granted me this status,” Ziadeh told me Sunday. “It was given to Syrians who live in the U.S. and can’t go back to Syria. Not only to Syrians, actually, but also Somalis and Sudanese and Yemenis. These are four countries now on President Trump’s list of banned travelers which were previously prioritized for Temporary Protected Status. In other words, America is abandoning the very people it once sought to rescue.”When the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime began in 2011, Ziadeh became a globe-trotting spokesman for then-nascent protest movement, trying in vain to persuade the Obama administration to do more to intervene in daily massacres.
I first met him in London after I co-wrote a who’s who in the Syrian opposition. Ziadeh was also quite helpful in feeding journalists like me leaked regime documents proving that Assad was personally overseeing a brutal crackdown on civilians or staging provocations designed to distract from that crackdown.
At one point, in 2012, he even served as de facto foreign minister of the Syrian National Council, an early, State Department-backed opposition umbrella organization that wasn’t quite mature or inclusive enough to attain the sought-after distinction of being the “sole legitimate representative of the Syrian people.” But Ziadeh was always one of the better representatives, opposed to the chauvinism and Islamism that hobbled other exiles looking to win friends and influence politicians, and much savvier about the inner workings of the U.S. government. He was interviewed by every major American newspaper and television network to advocate on behalf of his people.
It was a role that made him an even bigger target for Assad’s henchmen. “My brother was detained for six months back in Syria,” he said. “All my family members are now refugees in Turkey and Jordan.”
For all that, Ziadeh said, he always felt safe in America. He never imagined that his adoptive country could institute a blanket travel ban based on country of origin or religion. “This is something dictatorships in the Middle East do—but not a government in the center of the free world, which respects the rule of law.”
Over the weekend, however, he found that even his easily Google-able curriculum vitae mattered not at all when he was treated as a possible jihadist.
Ziadeh was detained at Dulles International Airport and questioned at length for two hours in way he hadn’t been at any time before or after 2014, when ISIS issued a list of its most wanted people, including 74 Syrian activists. “They put me No. 1 on that list.”
Ziadeh’s travel had already been in limbo. He had planned to go Istanbul, a frequent destination, to attend a conference on Jan. 23. But when he first heard that the White House was about to issue an executive order barring Syrian passport holders from re-entry to the U.S., he consulted his attorney about whether it’d be safe for him to go abroad at all. “He said ‘yes,’ because I wouldn’t be affected as I am already a legal resident in the U.S.,” Ziadeh said. “Nothing can prevent someone who has been here for 10 years from coming back.”
The attorney was wrong. Owing to the legal ambiguity and poor articulation of Trump’s ban, that’s exactly what happened. Two hours before the president signed the document, sending visitors from all seven Muslim-majority countries affected into a state of international chaos and confusion, Ziadeh’s lawyer told him he had to return to the U.S. at once or risk never coming back.
“I asked both the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security what to do,” he said. “They both gave me different answers. State said they had no guidelines to follow with respect to my case. DHS said I had to talk again to my lawyer. But it was already 9 p.m. on Saturday night and I couldn’t find a flight home at that hour.”
Ziadeh risked the journey the next day, taking a United Airlines flight with a connection at Frankfurt. After some confusion by the German border guards, who first denied and then allowed him access to his second flight, Ziadeh landed at Dulles, had his passport confiscated, and was placed into a
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