Kurds under scrutiny
12 agencies in on money transfer investigation
By Rachana Dixit, news editor
Posted on April 27, 2006

Being named a convicted felon was probably not a part of Harrisonburg resident Rasheed Qambari’s American dream when he left Kurdistan and arrived in the United States in 1997.

Qambari was indicted in October 2005 for violating a provision of the USA PATRIOT Act dealing with transferring money overseas. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District, the four men transferred $3 million abroad. Three other men, Ahmed Abdullah, Amir Rashid and Fadhil Noroly, were indicted with the same charge, but Qambari was the first to be convicted in a jury trial. Now, he may face up to a $250,000 fine and five years of jail time.

Abdullah and Rashid both pleaded guilty on March 2 and April 15 to the money transferring charge. Currently, Noroly is awaiting his trial, scheduled for May 17.

Under the current law, operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business is illegal until a license is obtained, in this case, from the Virginia State Corporation Commission or the U.S. Department of Treasury. But Qambari said he was not running a business when transferring money abroad since he did not make a profit from doing so.

“I never intentionally meant to break the law,” Qambari said. “The whole thing happened without the mindset of a business.”

Qambari originally was brought here by the US Government to flee Saddam Hussein’s regime. The regime was known for oppressing Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region located in the northern part of Iraq.

“If we didn’t run away, we would have faced execution,” he said. However, he left Kurdistan alone, and started to work two jobs in the U.S. in order to bring his family over.

This, he said, is when he first started sending money overseas; Qambari’s family needed money to get a passport so they could leave Kurdistan, and there is no banking system in Iraq.

“I had friends who hid [my family] from the military,” Qambari said. “I didn’t send money back home for terrorism activity.”

His wife and children joined him in May 1998 after spending $15,000. He still had other family members in Kurdistan, though, and would periodically send money to them to purchase items, such as medicine.

In 2002, after the Patriot Act had already been signed into law, Qambari said his brother needed money, and he could transfer the money through a family friend who had a Turkish bank account.  The family-friend would take 5 percent of the money for his profit and then send it to the Kurdish families, but Qambari said he did not make a penny.

“I said, ‘I don’t need money for myself,’” he said.

Eventually, Harrisonburg community members started coming to Qambari to send money to Kurdistan as well. He said the total amount of money he has sent by himself amounts to roughly $150,000. The whole time, Qambari said, he did not realize he was breaking the law.

“Nobody told me, ‘Listen, you’ll get in trouble if you send money,’” he said. He added that he hasn’t sent money from that particular account since December 2002.

“I challenge anyone to say I sent one penny after the FBI came to my house,” Qambari said. The FBI showed up at his home, the first out of two visits, in January 2003.

Then, in late October 2005, the FBI raided about six Kurdish families’ homes. According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Virginia, the investigation was conducted by 12 federal and state agencies, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the FBI, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service and Virginia State Police.

U.S. Attorney John Brownlee said before the Patriot Act was passed, there was a law already in the U.S. Code saying money transfers overseas were illegal without a license.

The difference was that a person could only be indicted if they intended to break the law.

The Patriot Act revised the intent requirement, making it so the person did not have to intentionally violate the law to be indicted.

“Most crimes, you only have to violate the law,” Brownlee said. “Our responsibility is to enforce the law fairly.”

He added, “These are important cases. It is important that the United States be able to monitor the flow of money that travels outside the United States.”

Although three out of the four men have been found or pleaded guilty, members of the community have expressed outrage at the case.

“We demand as a community, as a society, that these charges be dropped,” said Kakahama Askary, an imam of the local mosque and JMU professor of philosophy and religion. “They do not deserve to be prosecuted.”

JMU economics professor Barkley Rosser, a friend of Askary’s and an active person in the Kurdish community, agrees.

“Thousands of people are transferring money illegally, and no one gives a rat’s behind,” he said.

Qambari will attend his sentencing hearing May 3. The next sentencing, for Rashid, will take place May 30.  All four men, if convicted on the felony charges, could be deported back to Kurdistan.

Rashid, Abdullah and Noroly have not received U.S. citizenship; Qambari took his citizenship test and passed, but has not yet received documentation, and thus is still eligible for deportation.

He hopes this will not happen, as it would undo years of effort to get out of an oppressed country.

“We’ve been through hell,” he said. “But by [sending money], you’re saving a life back there. That’s the choice we made.”