US teen on way home after solo adventures in Iraq

MAYBE it was the time the taxi dumped him at the Iraq-Kuwait border, leaving him alone in the middle of the desert.

Or when he drew a crowd at a Baghdad food stand after using an Arabic phrase book to order.

Or the moment a Kuwaiti cab driver almost punched him in the face when he balked at the e85 fare.

But at some point, Farris Hassan, a 16-year-old from Florida, realised that travelling to Iraq by himself was not the safest thing he could have done with his Christmas holiday.

Farris, of Fort Lauderdale, was put on a flight home yesterday.

He had been under the care of the US Embassy after being on his own in Iraq for several days.

“I am very pleased to announce that the young American citizen who has been in Iraq the past few days has now safely departed Baghdad, and this young American is now on his way back home to his family in the United States,” Consul General Richard B Hermann said.

Forty American citizens have been kidnapped since March 2003, of whom 10 have been killed. About 15 remain missing.

Farris, a junior at Pine Crest School, recently studied immersion journalism - where a writer lives the life of his subject in order to better understand it.

The teenager, whose parents were born in Iraq but have lived in the US for about 35 years, says he wanted to travel to Baghdad to better understand what Iraqis are living through.

Skipping a week of school, he left the country on December 11, telling only two high school friends of his plans.

His travels took him to Kuwait and Lebanon before he arrived in Iraq on Christmas Day.

After his second night in Baghdad, he contacted the Associated Press and said he had come to do research and humanitarian work. The agency then called the US Embassy.

“I was so anxious. Words cannot even express it,” his mother, Shatha Atiya, said.

Farris does not speak Arabic and has no experience in war zones, but he wanted to find out what life was like there. “He is very driven and he is very patriotic. He believes in democracy,” his mother said.

Ms Atiya said her son is studious, works on the school newspaper and is on the debate team. He is a member of a Republican Party club at school who spends his time reading, rather than socialising, his mother said.

“He thinks girls require too much time, and he has more important things to do,” Ms Atiya said.

When school officials learned of Farris’s trip, they threatened to expel him, but Ms Atiya and Farris’s father, Redha Hassan, a physician, persuaded officials to allow him to remain. It was not immediately clear why they wanted to expel him.

Aside from the research he wanted to accomplish, he also wrote in an essay saying he wanted to volunteer in Iraq.

“There is a struggle in Iraq between good and evil, between those striving for freedom and liberty and those striving for death and destruction,” he wrote.