She survived explosions and fear. Now, this Iraqi refugee is finding purpose in Nashville

When she was a little girl, Iran supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini gave her nightmares.

Born in Baghdad in 1980 — the same year the Iraq-Iran war started — Zainab Al-Fatlawi remembers being glued to one of the two government-run TV channels at cartoon time. But Iraqi television producers always aired graphic war updates just before the cartoons started, she said.

"They showed dead bodies with dramatic music," Al-Fatlawi said, eyes getting wider. "Hands cut off, heads smashed, and that music was really scary.

"And Khomeni, I used to have nightmares about him. He’s the evil guy. That’s how [TV reports] showed him. He'd hit buttons to launch missiles, saying, 'These will go to Iraq!'"

The horrors of war remained in her house when the TV was turned off: Al-Fatlawi's uncle fought in the war. She remembers her aunt crying, wondering if he had been killed in the latest battle.

Violence always seemed close by until she became a young adult, working for the U.S. government — and then, it was right in her face. Al-Fatlawi survived both a car bomb explosion and a bomb detonating in the Baghdad cafe where she was eating, the two attacks only 10 months apart.

That second explosion helped spark her and her husband to make the painful decision to leave Iraq, and they eventually landed in a U.S. city they'd never heard of — Nashville, Tennessee.

Once here, though, they found community among other immigrants from the Middle East. And Al-Fatlawi said she found a God-given mission that gives her purpose and joy.

That journey, though, was marked by sadness, confusion, grief and a smelly Harding Place apartment. It began with an anime globetrotting teenager named Sandybell.

'I prayed that we'd all die together'

Al-Fatlawi, as a girl, never missed an episode of anime Japanese TV series "Hello! Sandybell."

"It was exciting — she had a story all the time, and her boyfriend, Marc, was so handsome. All the girls my age thought so," she said, smiling, her face lighting up. "Sandybell was beautiful, with a good heart, traveling all over, and we loved Sandybell’s dog, Oliver."

That helped instill Al-Fatlawi's desire to travel the world. But her first significant trip happened to escape violence, not to explore. The U.S. attacked Iraq after its leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, when the girl was in sixth grade.

Al-Fatlawi's father moved the family to a beautiful village in southern Iraq where he grew up, hoping to avoid fighting in Baghdad. She thought of the move as a vacation — until fighter jets started dropping bombs nearby.

"At night, we all slept in one room away from the window, all together on mattresses on the floor. And I remember praying, if the bomb goes on our house, I prayed that we’d all die together."

After Desert Storm, the country and Al-Fatlawi's family enjoyed relative peace, and she studied English literature at Baghdad's Al-Mamoun University College, still hoping to travel the world.

Then, the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks happened, and two years later, the U.S. attacked Iraq again, aiming to remove Hussein from power. That happened just as Al-Fatlawi started looking for work. Since she spoke English, she got a job working for the Americans, who occupied Iraq and battled an anti-American insurgency that popped up after Hussein was deposed.

Al-Fatlawi worked for the U.S. Army and then the State Department, dangerous assignments because of the pockets of anti-American hatred there.

"A lot of my coworkers were chased and killed because of their association with Americans," she said. "I’m very social and all of the staff are my friends, and I’m losing people often."

Her mother begged her to quit, but Al-Fatlawi said she was too stubborn — even after a car bomb exploded 20 yards from her outside U.S.-led coalition headquarters in January 2004, killing 24 people.

"Boom! The explosion knocked me off my feet. If you saw the fire, you thought everyone got killed. I saw body parts on the ground," she said.

"I took a taxi to the other side of Green Zone, it was so weird, everything was peaceful there."

About 10 months later, Al-Fatlawi was having lunch with coworkers just outside the embassy compound at The Green Zone Cafe. After ordering biryani, she noticed her boss chewing on a pen, and she asked him if he was scared.

Seconds later, a bomb exploded two tables away.

BOOM.

"I was on the floor and I thought I either died or was about to die," she said. "So much smoke. I couldn’t believe I survived."

In the deathly quiet, Al-Fatlawi recited prayers, found her eyeglasses and put them on, and was relieved to see her boss and her coworkers were alive. She heard nothing at first, then a buzzing. Doctors said the explosion burst one of her eardrums.

The danger never subsided. A friend said one of her relatives saw Al-Fatlawi's name on a kill list, and her American bosses sent her early to a training in Washington, D.C., to get her out of the country for a while.

Once there, an instructor took her to U.S. surgeons, who repaired her ear drum.

Never heard of Nashville

Still, Al-Fatlawi never fully felt safe, not even in the states.

"Even when I went to training, if someone will move furniture and there’s a big noise, I jumped."

Through the attacks and explosions, Al-Fatlawi started dating and then married an Iraqi coworker, Sami. A year or so later, her husband's 15-year-old brother was killed, and that proved to be the tipping point, for Al-Fatlawi's husband, anyway.

"I saw him crying for the first time," Al-Fatlawi said. "I loved my job so much, I would’ve stayed. He said, 'We survived so far, I don’t know how much longer we’ll survive.'

"We wanted things to work, we wanted to live in peace, we wanted to start a family. So I agreed to leave."

But it was hard. She left behind her parents, five younger siblings, a nicely furnished apartment and a Mercedes car in a beautiful, albeit dangerous, neighborhood.

The couple went to Jordan and waited for several months before being approved to get into the U.S. under a special immigrant visa. Authorities assigned them to Nashville.

"I’d never heard of Nashville," Al-Fatlawi said, smiling. "I heard of New York, Texas, California and Las Vegas. I'd never heard of Tennessee. They said it's beautiful, with four seasons, all green."

The couple, coming from a city of 8 million people in Baghdad, was surprised to see relatively few lights outside the plane window when landing in Nashville in 2007. "It felt like we were in the middle of nowhere."

Al-Fatlawi also felt disappointed when she and her husband were taken to a small apartment in South Nashville, an older one that smelled: "It felt like a cheap motel. It wasn't like the city I'd imagined in my head."

No subway. Few taxis. The next morning, her husband wanted to explore the city, but Al-Fatlawi just wanted to stay in bed.

'God has a plan for me'

Eventually, with help from volunteers at Grace Chapel Church in Franklin, they made friends, moved to a nicer apartment, found jobs and fell in love with Tennessee. Two of her siblings and her husband's family eventually moved to the U.S.

After having two miscarriages in Iraq, Al-Fatlawi gave birth to two sons, now 14 and 8. And she got a job, and found purpose, at nonprofit Siloam Health, a Christian-based healthcare facility focused on the uninsured, underserved and culturally marginalized patients in Nashville. More than 90 percent of patients are immigrants.

She runs the Nashville Neighbors program, which connects refugees with American volunteers.

She speaks Arabic with patients from Middle Eastern countries who haven't learned English yet. And she encourages all refugees to walk through the same fears she had when she came to the U.S.

"I missed a lot, my siblings' weddings, their first children's births. It's hard feeling homesick," she said.

"But God had a plan for me. I survived all this because there’s something He wants me to do. Because I’ve been through this, I know the feelings and I know the immigrants' frustrations and stress. I tell them, 'You’re doing this for your children. It’s a land of opportunity, and you're going to make it. This is a country where you can do anything if you put your mind to it.'"

Do you know a Nashvillian who has survived trauma and now helps others do the same? Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Iraqi refugee in Nashville: Finding new purpose at Siloam Health