August 2nd, 1990 - It was a beautiful summer morning I wouldn’t soon forget, nor would the rest of the world. After performing Fajr salaah at our local masjid, Masjid al-Zaahim, myself and a mix of children and teenagers headed out for an hour-long walk to the beach.

The spot we chose to swim was right in front of the late crown prince Shaykh Sa’ad al-Abdullah al-Subah’s palace, which made for an amazing view since it was adjacent to the famous Kuwait beach towers. Along with the pleasant weather, it was an amazing day for swimming, and I remember being neck deep in water so crystal clear I could see my feet at the bottom easily.

We didn’t expect the air to be ripped and the ground to be shaken by the deafening scream of military fighter jets flying directly overhead. We were completely caught by surprise, thinking that some sort of military training exercise was taking place, albeit strangely close to the civilian population. We quickly realized how wrong we were when we looked at the Kuwait Towers and saw that a missile had been launched at one of them. Military trucks quickly surrounded the towers and police sirens were blaring all around. We didn’t yet know it, but the attack was the beginning of the first gulf war. This is my brief eyewitness account of what happened between August 2nd, 1990 and February 26th, 1991.

Day 1: Chaos and Confusion

Not knowing yet what was happening, we decided to return home immediately. I was in charge of the group and decided it would be best to take a bus home rather than walk as we had earlier. Unfortunately, no bus or taxi would stop for us and after much waiting, we had no choice but to return home walking.

We crossed a street in front of the royal palace and a group of Kuwaiti soldiers came out, pointing their rifles at us and yelling at us to stay away. It was the first time any of us had been threatened in this manner, and the children began panicking, so I had them all hold hands and keep close together.

We followed the main highway leading to the capital and found that the traffic traveling towards the capital was jam-packed despite the great number of lanes. There was almost no traffic moving in the opposite direction. We saw that the police, a man and a woman, had blocked traffic and were re-directing it away from the capital, telling people to stay away.

I called out to the female police officer, asking what was going on. The policewoman turned around and, seeing all the kids with me, burst into tears exclaiming, “What are you kids doing here? Go home now, Iraq has already taken the capital!”

I decided it would be safer to cut through the Kuwaiti neighborhoods rather than take the main roads to return home. The children were scared and crying, and I had to again hold them close to make sure they were alright.

When we finally arrived in our neighborhood Hawalli, we were surrounded by chaos - people were storming grocery stores, stocking up on anything and everything they could carry. I walked each of the children to their homes, mothers upset and crying at the door, happy that their children were safe. They offered to let us stay in their homes until the things cleared up a bit, but after dropping all the children home, I returned home as well.

I was staying with my grandmother, and my older sister and her husband were visiting us, while my parents were in the US. Our biggest concern was my younger brother (17 at the time), who had traveled to Iraq for some shopping and sightseeing. After two weeks, we lost hope in his returning back to us, and we hoped he would be able to cross the Iraqi border into Jordan, but alhamdulillaah, he did return very soon after the conflict began.

The first day was truly nerve-wracking. We could not understand why Iraq, a neighboring and fellow Arab country, would attack Kuwait over something like oil. Apparently there was a dispute over oil production, prices, and oil fields Iraq had against Kuwait, and the dispute had escalated such that Iraq felt compelled to take punitive action. All we could really do now was wait and watch what happened.

Around mid-day, we caught our first sight of the Iraqi army, accompanied by a helicopter prominently displaying the Iraqi flag. It was painfully obvious that the Iraqi army was in control of most, if not all of Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government escaped into Saudia, and by the end of the day the Kuwaiti military was running away in defeat. I saw some of them breaking into a laundromat and changing into civilian clothes in order to escape harm. Using binoculars, I was able to see the palace we were swimming next to earlier that day burning down and I wondered about the soldiers guarding it that had chased us away. None of us could believe what we were seeing, bringing tears to our eyes.

Resistance continued for a few more nights until it was completely suppressed.

Life Under Occupation

Kuwait was a land of religious freedom, and the idea of living under the banner of Iraq’s extreme socialist Baathist ideology was terrifying for many. As a result, many imams left the country as soon as the Jordanian border opened up. By necessity, I became a volunteer imam for the first time in my life.

Sharing the duty with a friend, we maintained the adhaan and salaah in our masjid, even though we were younger than many attending. We also took care of the khutbahs and the general talks, and even led the Taraweeh salaah. Several months into the war, we were able to continue functioning despite the lack of government support for the community.

Using my position as Imam, we were able to coordinate and establish a self-sufficient system based on volunteer effort. We were able to maintain certain necessary community functions such as trash removal (until the Iraqis confiscated our trucks) as well as feeding the needy.

January 16th, 1991: Airstrikes

Life continued as mentioned earlier until mid-January of the next year when the airstrikes began. The first night was the most terrifying - we could hear the bombing from far away, our homes would shake from the blasts, and we could see the glow from the blasts in the darkness of night. I stayed up the entire night, unable to sleep from the non-stop shelling. When Fajr rolled around, my mother (who had since returned from the US) initially tried to prevent me from attending the salaah at the masjid, but eventually she capitulated when she saw our neighbor going to the masjid.

I had expected the masjid to be empty, but it was just the opposite - the masjid was packed as though it was Friday jumu’ah and the people were busying themselves with worship and reading the Qur’aan as though the end was imminent. Unfortunately, everything went back to “normal” after a few days, as everyone became accustomed to the airstrikes.

The End of Iraqi Occupation

In the last few weeks of the war, we lived in total darkness due to the destruction of the power grid. We ran out of gas, fuel, and candles, so we used recycled wax from the candles and used olive oil for light. People had to build kilns behind their homes for cooking, using construction wood for fuel. The humanitarian situation continued to deteriorate as the air strikes on the supply lines prevented provisions from coming in.

It wasn’t until February 26th, 1991 that the situation changed. I went out for Fajr and immediately realized something was very different - the air was pitch black with the smell of diesel wafting in the air. I couldn’t see the way in front of me and I had to stumble around in the dark until I found my way to the masjid. After I led the Fajr salaah, someone behind me stated, “Saddam withdrew last night.” A debate broke out between those who were pro-Saddam (actually, it was only one man) and those against him. We decided to investigate the situation firsthand.

We waited until sunrise which took longer than usual due to the excessive darkness caused by the burning oil fields, which puffed out immense clouds of smoke and then caused crude oil to rain everywhere. When we finally left, we discovered that the withdrawal was indeed real, albeit chaotic, and the army could be found on the highways wandering, looking to find their way back to Iraq. Many of them were killed or taken prisoners during this time.

It was not until the end of the day when we saw the first military vehicles from the international alliance enter the area, carrying with them the national flag of Kuwait.

Burial of 465 identified Bosniaks (July 11, 2007)

I first set foot on Bosnian soil in the Spring of ‘97, arriving in what was left of the capital, Sarajevo (pronounced Sa-ra-yae-vo). The brutality of war and the stench of death still hung heavily in the Sarajevo airport, as it did everywhere else, less than a year-and-a-half after the Bosnian War had been officially declared ended according to the Dayton Peace Agreement.
I had come as a relief worker, sponsored by the Saudi High Commission for Relief to Bosnia and Herzegovina (known in Bosnia as Visiko Saudiski Komitate [VSK]). My assignment was twofold - one, on the humanitarian level, I was to help make sure the basic needs of the refugees and others were met, and two, on the spiritual / educational level, to lift the spirit and morale of the younger generation and provide them with education and training in areas where they could benefit both on a personal and communal level.
During my first month, I was temporarily stationed in Ilidza, one of the more well-maintained suburbs located on the outskirts of Sarajevo. It had not suffered as much damage during the war because it had been a Serbian part of the capital. During the month in Ilidza, I was able to see firsthand the kind of life other relief workers had in Bosnia, most of whom were Arabs and Saudis and part of the same relief organization as myself. From what I learned from them, because the war had just ended less than a year-and-a-half earlier, there still remained many dangers. It was an environment in which stories of both inspiration and tragedy were continuing to take place, and it gave me much to be both anxious and excited about.

The City of Zavidovici

Later that year, I was stationed in Zavidovici (pronounced Za-ve-do-vet-chi), a large town in the heart of Bosnia, located north of Zenica (pronounced Zae-neet-sa), one of the larger cities in the country. It was central in location and famous for it’s wood work, a product of a famous, one-of-a-kind factory known as Krivaja (pronounced Kree-vaa-ya), named after one of the two major rivers of Bosnia. Within the town itself were twelve thousand residents, and if the surrounding villages were added to the total, the municipality population could be counted as being closer to sixty thousand, more than tow third of whom were Muslims, or Boshniak. The rest of the population was comprised of Serbians (Orthodox Christians) and Croatians (Catholics) who had once lived side-by-side with the Muslims before the war started, and Cigans (pronounced Tse-gan) of the Roma ethnicity, known also as gypsies who, unfortunately, always lived on the margins of their host communities.
When I arrived in Zavidovici, I was surprised by the number of hijaabi and niqaabi women as well as bearded men present as compared with other cities I had visited. It was an impressive sight to behold, and I didn’t know why that was until I learned more about the town’s recent history while I was there. During the fighting, the centrality of its location had made it of strategic importance to both the Bosnians and the Serbs. In 1995, one of the last and most furious of battles took place to liberate the mountain of Panjalik, a notorious stronghold of the Serbs located close to Zavidovici. It’s liberation made news around the world for many reasons, one of which was that it began a domino effect that led to the surrender of the Serbs and the end of the war with the Dayton Peace Agreement in November, 1995. It also made news due to the participation of the controversial “Mujaahideen” brigade in the battle, a brigade made up of foreign volunteer fighters from around the world as well as locals, and it was officially embedded in the ARBiH, the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Mujaahideen had a training camp located in a village on the outskirts of Zavidovici during the war. When the war ended, a few hundred of them married Bosnian women, gained Bosnian citizenship through naturalization, and settled in a formerly Serbian village between Zavidovici and Maglaj (pronounced Mag-laay) known as Bocnja (pronounced Botch-ne-ya). This was the reason for such a relatively distinct presence of practicing Muslims in the area - although the Mujaahideen didn’t have anything to do with the administration of the city, their presence and representation of orthodox practice continued its influence after the war. Interestingly, the main city itself didn’t actually have many foreign ex-fighters residing in it - as I recall, there were only seven Mujaahideen who broke away from the village for ideological and administrative reasons and took their families to live among the general population.
The town of Zavidovici itself, now almost two years later, had become stagnant and much of the population was made up refugees displaced from around the country. Homes were destroyed, villages were leveled to the ground, unemployment ran high, and there was little hope in the future.

The Village of Vozuca

The Battle of Panjalik (known more popularly as “Badr al-Bosna”) also resulted in the freeing of larger amounts of territory within central Bosnia beyond the expectation of even the ARBiH itself. One of the villages within those territories was Vozuca (pronounced Vo-zoo-cha), a formerly Serbian village located a few miles outside of Zavidovici. It was said that it was taken in exchange for Srebrenica (pronounced Sreb-rae-neet-sa), which had fallen weeks earlier in the hands of the Serbs.
Upon my first visit to the village, I realized that nothing I had seen in either Sarajevo or Zavidovici prepared me for the sight of Vozuca. It held a population close to seven thousand, but it was built to hold only half that amount. Virtually the entire population was from somewhere other than Vozuca, about half whom were from neighboring villages captured by the Serbs and Croatians, the other half of which were from another city on the eastern border of Bosnia shared with Republika Srpska, the homeland of the Serbs of Bosnia. That city was Srebrenica, and it was the first I heard of that place.
Vozuca had yet another demographic peculiarity I had not seen in other areas I visited - the majority of the population was made up of women of all ages, and children. The number of men living in the village were relatively few, even countable, and many of them were of old age. Through my own research, I learned of the atrocities which had taken place two years earlier in Srebrenica.

The Story of Srebrenica

Due to its proximity with the border of the Republic of the Bosnian Serbs, Srebrenica became an enclave heavily populated by refugees from all surrounding regions when the war began. The Muslims, or Boshniaks, who were surrounded by an ocean of hostile Serbs from the army of the Republika Srpska, came to Srebrenica as it was declared to be a “safe area” by the UN Security Council in 1993. As the war waged on, however, conditions in Srebrenica dramatically deteriorated and people began dying of starvation. The area was supposed to be protected by the UN, and the assignment was given to the Dutch from the Netherlands, but even with the presence of 400 UN Blue Beret Peacekeepers, the army of Republika Srpska captured the city in July of 1995, jeopardizing the lives of more than fifty thousand people.
A deliberate and systematic ethnic cleansing took place immediately, starting July 11th until close to the end of the month, a planned genocide which legal documents coming out of the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) later showed was carried out by the army of Republika Srpska. The end result was the massacre of more than 8000 men and young teens deemed to be of military age, the systematic rape and humiliation of many women, and the displacement of thousands of newly widowed women and young children across the ARBiH controlled territories. One of those territories was Vozuca, which received 800 widows and their children.

The Refugees of Srebrenica

It was almost two years after the genocide had taken place that I came to Vozuca in the late spring of 1997. Above us, the weather was cloudy and raining, and below us, the roads were destroyed and hard to drive on without a vehicle equipped to properly handle the terrain. Ahead of us, as I looked at the residents, I could feel their sadness and grief before even meeting them. As we continued driving along the muddy and rough terrain, traces of life were hardly visible. Even the rich agricultural land was left dead in many areas, and not simply due to lack of equipment or manpower - the people themselves had lost motivation after the immense loss of their loved ones.
As we toured the village, our astonishment grew, seeing the number of women and children whose lives had been ruined and needed rebuilding. Widows with their children constituted half the population of Vozuca, many of whom refused to believe that their men and children were gone forever. They held themselves together on the false hope that their husbands or children were either misplaced or held captive by the enemy. Even as news of newly discovered mass graves surfaced every few months, they clung to the hope that their loved ones had survived the trap of death set for them by soldiers of the Army of the Republika Srpska. That glimmer of hope was all that kept them surviving day-to-day.
We also found that the widows had already organized themselves to live in wrecked homes. In many cases, two, three, or more families were living in the same house. There were no men around, only women and young children. The first house we visited had been made into a small orphanage where some of the widows were caring for both their own children as well the children of other fellow Srebrenicans that had fallen, many of whom were close relatives or neighbors. They didn’t have much, but with what little they had, they were able to keep the children from going hungry or freezing.
A few months later, we initiated a program to acquire as many donations from Sarajevo as we could for the Srebrenican refugees, but the need was more than one organization could handle alone. Of course, there were other organizations working on the ground as well, but even that was not enough to cover for Vozuca, let alone the rest of Bosnia.
I recall one time receiving a phone call from VSK headquarters in Sarajevo, informing us of a convoy of trucks loaded with high-quality Korean-made winter blankets, the like of which Bosnia had not seen for some time, if they had ever seen it at all. They were donations from some merchants based in Saudi Arabia and were sent for the most needy areas.
All the widows and refugees of Vozuca received their share. When I arrived to see them distributed, the scene was like Hajj. People (mainly women) were coming from everywhere, hoping to get one or two blankets. I had mixed feelings about the event, as I had to turn away people if their name wasn’t on the list of recipients, but at the same time, it was fulfilling to see the smiles on the faces of those who did receive the blankets.
Alhamdulillaah, I continued my visits to Vozuca over the years, and as my relationship grew stronger with some of the families, it also became awkward. Although I was already married (not from Bosnia, however), on many occasions I received offers for marriage from the women there, often to be a second or even third wife. It was both beyond my capacity as well as jurisdiction. What was truly sad was that neither the religious institution there nor the legislative authority was able to offer a solution to the problem. In fact, a certain Imam who was popular in the region said the idea of even taking a second wife was outlawed (according to him) by Islamic law. As a result of these difficulties, the area was infested with a certain degree of immorality which many took advantage of.

Return to Srebrenica

Late in 1999, there were attempts from the European Union and the UN to organize convoys carrying some of the displaced refugees of Srebrenica to visit their hometown for the first time since the massacre nearly four years earlier. It was an attempt to rebuild trust within Bosnia’s ethnically and religiously diverse population. The first convoy deployed from Sarajevo was made up of a few coaster buses accompanied by SFOR, the UN and NATO peacekeepers, as well as the IPTF, the International Police Forces.
We were told to be ready to travel to Srebrenica as well in case a convoy were to be sent from Vozuca and needed accompanying. It was my hope to be able to visit Srebrenica, but it was not to be. The city was now primarily made up of angry Serb refugees, and once the news came out that a convoy was on its way, the Serb refugees blockaded the main roads and hurled stones at it. One of my colleagues present at the time said the Serb refugees also opened fire on one of the military helicopters hovering above the crowd. The first convoy was unable to pass and returned to Sarajevo, and our convoy was cancelled.

Lessons and Memories

It was not a journey in life I had expected to make, nor did I realize the impact it would have upon me. It instilled in me a passion for humanitarian work, taught me the value of relief agencies, and filled me with a desire to just want to be there for others when they need it. There remain so many memories and faces from those four years of my life that I cannot forget, such as the fulfillment I had from putting a smile on the face of an orphan or widow, or from hearing the words, “Da ti Allah nagradi,” (may Allah reward you) when I was able to help someone in need. I did not realize then that the people, particularly of Srebrenica, would hold a place in my heart forever.
It’s now almost nine years since I left Bosnia in October 2000 for the US, and though some time has passed since those days, my wife and I remain strongly connected to Bosnia through the memories of the beautiful days we spent with the hospitable people of that region. I still follow the news on the developments in Srebrenica as I feel it’s part of me and a part of my life, though I never visited Srebrenica except through the lives of its people, their stories, and their tragedies.
Since that time, every July has become a special month for me to remember the massacre, the loss of thousands of Bosnian Muslim lives in Srebrenica. It’s a chance for me to reconnect with the land I once lived in and came to love as part of my life. It’s also a chance for me to reflect on those days and nights spent in humanitarian work, hoping that my mission was successful in bringing about some small measure of peace, relief, and happiness.
May Allah accept from us all our best and righteous deeds.

Yaser Birjas,
July 15, 2009

Some links for images and further readings:

On the massacre:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srebrenica_massacre

On Vozuca:

http://www.aimpress.ch/dyn/trae/archive/data/199703/70314-005-trae-sar.htm