Word: hassan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Evidence has surfaced that Hassan had been previously troubled by the accounts of war veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Records further indicate that he had been upset about being assigned to Afghanistan, possibly due to his religious beliefs. Still, media and government officials should refrain from jumping to conclusions concerning the role of Maj. Hassan’s religious background in this incident. Some rashly speculated that this was an organized terrorist attack, but such claims have since been disproved. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, for instance, suggested that Hassan had become extremist in his views. Whether this drove...
Mahad Abdullahi Hassan had never heard of Nepal before the day he landed there. When the 28-year-old Somali boarded a flight from Dubai to Kathmandu on May 23, 2007, he was hoping he would finally reach his dream destination: Sweden. He had, after all, shelled out $4,000 to a human trafficker who promised to smuggle him to the Scandinavian country...
...Instead, when Hassan got off the plane, he found himself in the airport in Kathmandu, where a taxi took him and the trafficker, who was traveling with him, to a bustling tourist neighborhood in the Nepalese capital. "It was a strange place," says Hassan. "All the buildings looked the same. Everything was new to me." When they booked a hotel there, the trafficker assured Hassan that he was arranging the necessary documents to complete their journey to Sweden. But the next morning, when Hassan woke up in an empty room, he realized he'd been duped. "I realized...
...loss, perhaps, but not alone. Gradually, Hassan integrated himself into the close-knit community of 84 Somali refugees living in Nepal, the largest nationality of some 300 United Nations-recognized urban refugees now living in Kathmandu. The Somalis began to arrive in Nepal in early 2006. Most of them are from Mogadishu, and nearly all of them are victims of trafficking. Many say they, like Hassan, were promised passage to Europe; some claim that they were supposed to go to Naples, Italy, but ended up in Nepal because of the similar-sounding names...
...hunger at home, Somali refugees are scattered all over the world. The vast majority have escaped to neighboring African countries. After surviving death threats, kidnappings and the murders of their loved ones back home, the relatively few Somalis in Nepal are just whiling away their time, waiting for what Hassan calls a "durable solution" - repatriation to Somalia, resettlement in another country or local integration in Nepal. As in Hassan's case, they help each other out and also celebrate festivals like Eid together. But they also complain angrily about what they see as the indifference of the Nepalese government...