Sometimes they put innocent men in prison. Yassin Aref is one of those men. This is the story of a UN refugee who sought peace & freedom in America. A Muslim imam entrapped in a phony "sting" concocted by the FBI, accused of aiding terrorism, & sentenced in 2007 to 15 years in federal prison. This story is of an Iraqi Kurd who has struggled all his life just to survive. In 1970 Yassin was born to illiterate farming parents, grew up under the rule of Saddam Hussein, encountering tremendous poverty, brutality, and repression; as a teenager, he sympathized with the Kurdish peshmerga (freedom fighters) & risked his life opposing the dictator's genocide against the Kurds. In 1995, he married & left Kurdistan for Syria. He worked full-time to support his family, & graduated from Abu Noor Un. in Damascus with a degree in Islamic studies. Kurds had no freedom or rights in Syria, & in 1999 the stateless family was given refugee status by the UN and sent to Albany in upstate New York to begin a new life in America. In America, he worked at several low-paying jobs until he was appointed imam of Masjid as-Salam (House of Peace), a small Albany mosque. The 2004 FBI raid on the mosque and Yassin's arrest, which was nationally reported as a victory in the "war on terror," and his trial and conviction in 2006, tore his family, the mosque, the community, & the city apart. By the end of this memoir, filled with the peaceful, practical morality of Islam as well as flashes of humor, the reader will understand why he is no terrorist. The book ends with a compelling essay by volunteer lawyer Stephen Downs that details how the government's case against him was not a "sting" but a frame-up--an elaborate fiction presented in court as fact--with lives, families, and Constitutional rights sacrificed to our post-9/11 climate of fear. After expenses, all proceeds from the sale of the book will go to the Aref Children's Fund, to benefit Yassin's four young children.

Son of Mountains: My Life as a Kurd and a Terror Suspect

YASSIN AREF

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See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by YASSIN AREF. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Son of Mountains: My Life as a Kurd and a Terror Suspect