iraqi student solidarity committee

Andrew Birawri was a senior in high school when American troops bombed his city, beginning the War, which would later become the Occupation, in Iraq. The next year Andrew enrolled at Baghdad’s University of Technology to study mechanical engineering. “At the time I didn’t know I would be leaving, so I decided to carry on with my education until it got worse for me and for my family.” That point came in 2006, when the violence in Baghdad made life too dangerous for Andrew’s family to continue living there.

In Fall of 2007, a friend of mine named Hudson Muñoz approached me in Red Square. At the time, he was coordinating the student group sesame (Students Educating Students About the Middle East—now renamed the Mideast Solidarity Project). Hudson invited me to be part of a project that the group wanted to develop to have a student who had been displaced from their education in Iraq finish up at Evergreen for free. “I’m all about it,” I told him. I didn’t know then what I was getting myself into.