WARWICK — Two years ago, when Qussay Al-Attabi, then a student at Baghdad University, visited Roger Williams University as part of an Iraqi student delegation, he described why he continued going to classes while war was tearing his country apart.
"This," he said, "is the Iraqi perseverance."
Last night, that perseverance paid off for Al-Attabi. At 8:30 p.m., the 26-year-old arrived at T.F. Green Airport after trying for eight months to get a visa to work and study in the United States.
He will serve as a visiting scholar at Roger Williams University, where he will teach an Arabic language class this semester, while he begins a Ph.D. program in English literature at Brown University.
After coming down an escalator into the airport's arrivals hall, Al-Attabi was greeted with a hug by Roger Williams president Roy J. Nirschel.
"I'm really feeling great because I am free," he said. "But I have 26 million people left behind."
Al-Attabi, a former interpreter for the U.S. Army in Baghdad, says he had to leave Iraq. Targeted as an academic and for his work with the military, his life was at risk if he stayed in Baghdad.
Thousands of other Iraqi translators who worked for U.S. forces are trying to move out of the country as conditions deteriorate and their lives become increasingly threatened.
Al-Attabi is one of the lucky few to have gotten out. After receiving a death threat from a Shiite militia in Baghdad, Al-Attabi, a Sunni Muslim, fled last January to Jordan, where he was classified as a refugee by the United Nations.
Because of his background as a university lecturer, Al-Attabi was able to apply for a J-1 visa for visiting foreign academics. The visa came through Aug. 15, and Al-Attabi left as soon as he could.
He flew from Amman, the capital of Jordan, to Cairo, Egypt, then to JFK International Airport in New York before catching a connecting flight last night to Rhode Island. The trip took three days.
In February 2005, Al-Attabi, then 24, was a member of the first Iraqi student group to visit the United States in 35 years. The six students and one teacher from Basra and Baghdad spent 10 days in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and New York.
During the trip, Al-Attabi became the unofficial spokesman for the group, sitting for interviews with newspapers and television hosts.
"He was articulate and poised," said Rebecca Leuchak, a Roger Williams professor who helped organize the trip. "He's just an amazing person."
Al-Attabi and Nirschel did several media interviews together and hit it off. They stayed in touch by e-mail after the students went back to Iraq.
Al-Attabi had been working as an English teacher at a language institute in Baghdad while he worked part-time as an interpreter for a U.S. military police company. Soon after he returned to Baghdad, he started working full-time doing translation for an American infantry division. In January 2006, he took a job as a lecturer in the English department at Baghdad University.
Over the past two years, Nirschel said it quickly became clear that life in Iraq for Al-Attabi and other academics was getting worse.
"Qussay would write about bombings and faculty members dying," he said. "You could read through the e-mails the deterioration of the situation on the ground."
After Al-Attabi made it to Jordan, Nirschel started working his contacts in Washington to try and help him. He got in touch with the offices of U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy and Sen. Jack Reed. He called the State Department and the Institute of International Education, which has a program to find safe havens for scholars at risk.
Nirschel believes Al-Attabi would have died if he stayed in Iraq.
"I can't imagine being there," Nirschel said. "Here, we worry about running out of chalk or finding a parking space. There, you're worried about someone blowing you up or holding a gun to your head because you want to teach Chaucer."
When Al-Attabi stepped off the plane in New York yesterday, he called his parents in Baghdad.
"I told them I am free now," he said. "They started crying."