- Things began looking sketchier than ever to John Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 after some downtime in Kuwait City.
Employed by First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new US$592 million US Embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded at the airport by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai - not to Baghdad.
"I thought there was some sort of mix-up and I was getting on the
wrong plane," said the 48-year-old Floridian, who was working as a general construction foreman on the embassy project.
He buttonholed a First Kuwaiti manager standing nearby and asked what was going on. The manager waved his hand, looked around the terminal and whispered to keep quiet. "If anyone hears we are going to Baghdad, they won't let us on the plane," Owen recalled the manager saying.
The secrecy struck Owen as a little odd, but he grabbed his luggage and moved on. Everyone filed out to the private jet and flew directly to Baghdad. "I figured that they had visas for Kuwait and not Iraq," Owen said in an interview.
The deception had all the appearances of smuggling workers into Iraq, but Owen didn't know at the time that the Philippines, India and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and growing opposition to the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped "not valid for Iraq".
Read More
