"Miss Alex, you have to see this." Aland, an eleventh-grade scholarship student with shaken-soda energy and a struggling beard waved me over. He sat huddled with Rehan, a soft-spoken son from a less-famous line of the region’s most famous political family, sharing a pair of earbuds. They were listening to something exciting and revelatory, like desire. When I reached their computer, Aland offered me his earbud while Rehan played a video on YouTube. The three of us hunched together like jewelers around the computer monitor." |
The students knew. They were the ones who told us. Of course, we didn’t believe them. Confidently, we told them it was not true. Falteringly, we told them, they must have gotten it wrong. Truthfully, we couldn’t comprehend what they were saying. So very little did we know.
*
“You guys are here early.”
The students nodded their heads without looking up from their computer screens. I had just walked into the upper grades’ English department faculty office, my mind running through the day’s tasks ahead. Our office housed a row of computers for students to use to apply for colleges. Normally, the students congregated in our office between or after their classes to gossip about their other teachers or to pry into our personal lives. They were never this focused unless there was an impending deadline.
“Do they have something due?” I asked Renee, my supervisor. She shook her head, her face an egg. Later, I would wonder if she had known what was coming. During my two years working for her, so often had I seen her play dumb to stay ahead.
I walked over to where my student Hawre was sitting, pulling on a thick pelt of side bangs as he read from his computer screen. “What are you working on?” I asked, stooping to nearsightedly peer over his shoulder, careful not to let specific parts of my upper body brush against his back or shoulder.
Hawre half-turned in his seat. “Miss Alex, do you know Mr. Azaan?’ his cheeks were flushed.
I paused. Azaan, the international school’s IT teacher, had been in my campus apartment a few days earlier, trying to poach me for a job at a Microsoft Future Tech learning hub he was opening in the nearby city of Ankawa. Gossip was rife at the school, and the last thing I wanted was for someone to have seen him entering or exiting my apartment. Azaan had a wife and three kids.
“Sure. He’s a colleague.” I kept my face very still.
Azaan had told me he was about to take a medical leave from the international school, courtesy of a bogus doctor’s note procured with the help of a bribe so he could still earn his teaching salary while he set up the tech hub and got it running. His doctor’s note didn’t extend to his weekend duties proctoring Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams, for which he earned an extra stipend.
“He was in prison in Sweden.” Hawre turned back to the computer, lusty for content.
I wanted to contradict him. How could Azaan have been hired with a prior record? But last term’s scandal—involving one of my supervisors, her falsified credentials, and a prescription pill habit, which she may or may not have asked a student’s pharmacist father to fill—was a fresh memory.
“For what?” I asked.
“For being one of Sweden’s most notorious rapists.” Hawre stumbled over the word notorious.
I swore riotously inside my head. “That can’t be true.”
“It says so here.” Hawre pointed to his computer screen, where the day’s edition of an online newspaper article with the title “A Pedophile Got a Job with an Elite School in Iraqi Kurdistan” was open. Ants crawled on the underside of my skin. I stood up and looked down the row of computers where pictures of Azaan with various unfortunate haircuts lidding his gerbil-like facial features popped from monitors. It was a small consolation that Hawre was reading about whatever this was in English.
Hawre read aloud. “‘One of Sweden’s most notorious rapists who made contact with his victims over the internet’—What does notorious mean?”
“Being famous for something bad.” I held my breath, waiting to see if Hawre would ask what rapist meant. When I’d taught his class The Great Gatsby the term prior, Hawre asked me what Nick meant when he reported that Gatsby “took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously, eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.” When I explained that Nick meant Gatsby had taken Daisy’s virginity, Aryan, another Kurdish student who had been raised in Florida before his family returned to the Kurdish homeland, immediately shot up his hand and asked if I was a virgin as my face lobstered. The school’s biology curriculum barely taught sexual reproduction. Just the week before, a gaggle of giggling eleventh-grade girls had burst into the office, howling over the Lebanese science teacher’s inability to say the letter p in English. “Mr. Edi says benis. Benis!” gasped eleventh-grade Viyan between rifts of laughter. I doubted the curriculum had a unit on consent. I shot Renee a look.
She shuffled over. More tight-lipped than a sphinx, Renee had served in the Canadian Armed Forces, where, allegedly, she had been shot in the line of duty. Her rumored bullet scar and lumbered walk added to her mystique. “What does the article say?” she asked, all naïve and nonchalant.
Hawre continued reading aloud from the screen. “‘One of Sweden’s most notorious rapists...’ Wait, I read that part.” As Hawre’s finger trailed a line of text on the screen, I read the fine print across Renee’s face and wanted to fashion the school’s code of conduct into a baseball bat and smash it against these hallowed walls. The administration must not have learned its lesson from last term’s scandal and failed to run thorough background checks on new employees.
“‘... was sentenced to ten years in a Swedish prison in 2007 after being convicted of carrying out 58 cases of sexual assault against young girls, including 11 counts of rape.’” Hawre interrupted himself. “What’s the difference between assault and rape?”
Gravity got greedier. “Renee?” I volleyed the question to her before escaping down the row of computers, my blood pulsing in my palms. When Azaan had come to my apartment to discuss the job, we’d sat in my living room together. I served us coffee and bottled water. I tried to reconcile the scheming, eye-glass wearing man in a Pillsbury Dough Boy body sitting on my sofa with someone capable of committing close-proximity acts of sexual violence. Azaan wasn’t particularly large or strong; were his victims tiny? He must have forged a sense of trust with them. I thought about the smooth way he justified his fraudulent medical leave while he set up his new business and how I had been half-tempted by his job offer.
“Miss Alex, you have to see this.” Aland, an eleventh-grade scholarship student with shaken-soda energy and a struggling beard waved me over. He sat huddled with Rehan, a soft-spoken son from a less-famous line of the region’s most famous political family, sharing a pair of earbuds. They were listening to something exciting and revelatory, like desire. When I reached their computer, Aland offered me his earbud while Rehan played a video on YouTube. The three of us hunched together like jewelers around the computer monitor.
The video clip featured a younger, thinner, less bald Azaan defending his crimes to an unseen interviewer for a Swedish TV show. “I like teenagers and I paid them,” read the English subtitles. Azaan explained that when he’d arrived in Sweden from his native Iraq, he’d seen a teenage couple making out in a park and thought “anything goes” with women in his newly adopted country. As I listened to Azaan’s justification, an invisible hand pressed on my heartbeat. A few months prior, a man walking past me outside a small Kurdish shop had swiftly thrust his hand out, grabbing my mons pubis hard, and squeezed it. He retracted his hand like a frog retracts its tongue and walked expertly back to his parked car as my Western, male colleague exited the store. The grabber took off as I unfroze and registered what had just happened. Some colleagues thought the violation was my fault because my knee-length, high-neck dress was sleeveless. Others chalked the assault up to my being foreign.
Othering as a justification for sexual violence is an assaultingly neat argument. Dohuk city cab drivers used it to rationalize attacking female Yazidi survivors of ISIS’ genocidal attack on Sinjar and its sex slave markets, figuring that the Yazidi women had already been compromised by ISIS fighters. A government advisor on religious affairs to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) elevated othering to high sparkle. Over watermelon shisha and tequila shots, he mentioned visiting an Ankawa brothel with a group of friends. Right before his lips encircled the plastic, highlighter yellow mouthpiece stuck on the end of the waterpipe, he said he and his friends had shared a thirteen-year-old Arab girl for a few hours. Then, he inhaled luxuriously.
Shock and horror rearranged my face.
He exhaled, and shisha smoke scalloped the edges of our table.
“You seem very pleased with yourself for gang-raping a thirteen-year-old.” Sometimes, you have to lash out just to breathe.
“Of course, I am. With a group, it was very cheap.”
I flared like a smeared firefly. Clinging to the fact that this minister of religious affairs lived for shock value, I hoped he was putting me on. In his cocaine-fueled youth, he had fronted a Wham! cover band, singing in London nightclubs, loud and humid, releasing stale gusts of sweat and booze.
“I’m surprised you chose an Arab girl,” I prodded.
“Of course, I chose a foreign girl. Who do you think works in the brothels?” He held the water pipe close to his mouth as if he might fellate it.
I changed tactics, trying to break him. “Thirteen is just a little older than your daughter.”
The look he shot me left an exit wound.
“Who went first?” I pressed.
“I did, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Ask Carl the next time you see him. He was there.”
My shoulders shuddered with an urge to icky-dance. Carl was his cousin who sometimes joined us for nights out when he was in town from Dubai. “In the room watching?”
“In the next room, waiting his turn.”
“That poor girl.”
“She enjoyed herself.”
“Now I know you’re lying.”
“For God’s sake.” His swears sounded like prayers. “I’m facilitating an important service. How else is she going to make a living?”
“She shouldn’t be working. She should be in school.”
“Idiot!” his voice creaked as his lungs hung onto the harsh, fragrant smoke. “What do you think happened to young Iraqi girls after your country invaded?”
“Miss Alex?” Aland’s voice pulled me back into the present. He and Rehan were watching me, waiting for my reaction. From being my students, they knew I was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, an icepack against a bruise.
I gritted my teeth and channeled a gracious Juliette Binoche. “How did you find out about this?” I asked, while inside, I was a snarling dog. How did the students know before the faculty did? In the days to come, the administration would never acknowledge the incident to the faculty, nor did they issue any guidelines on how to talk to our students about it.
“Tofiq’s father recognized Mr. Azaan when he dropped Tofiq off for his practice TOEFL last weekend,” Aland answered as Rehan left YouTube and surfed the internet. “Then he called the other parents to let them know, and then his father called the school.”
Later, when this story was officially told by the school’s administration, they would claim to have recognized Azaan and promptly fired him, and then they notified all the parents.
“How did Tofiq’s father know Azaan?” I asked, my contained temper a few degrees below heatstroke.
“His father saw him on TV in Sweden.”
Tofiq and his family had returned to the Kurdish capital from Sweden, part of the diaspora coming home to restart their lives in the region’s prosperous safety. If a family had owned land before they fled the violence plaguing Kurdistan from the late 1980s through the early aughts, by the time they returned, that land ownership had made them wealthy. Violence engulfed Iraq, a byproduct of the US invasion, making the Kurdish north, with its large oil and gas reserves, mountains, and more temperate climate, desirable. I taught a pair of Kurdish sisters who had recently returned from Michigan, where their father ran a gas station and convenience store outside a depressed city. Now, they lived in a neo-classical style mansion inside a newly built gated community.
My eyes swept the office. My female students’ faces were contorted and exposed by concentration. Some of them had drawn together in pairs. They talked quietly, their mouths hidden behind hand canopies, their eyes occasionally flicking around the room. Other faces were theaters of implicit emotions, curtained by long, dark hair. A few were twirling their hair as they scrolled and read. Had Azaan slipped into the cracks of their thoughts? If so, were certain moments strobing on and off in their minds like a broken flashlight? Did they blame themselves for enjoying the spotlight of his attention, or were they recasting past events to uproot the seeds of fresh disaster? Were the one or two sitting on their hands, hurting?
A big feeling, numb and shapeless, took over me. I was back in my own suburban high school, with a biology teacher named Mr. Dott, whose black, short-cropped beard and mustache were a reverse image of the patchy baldness stalking the top of his head. He used to interrupt his own lectures to point out how my eyes matched my sweater or comment on their blueness to the class. Heat would creep up my neck and rinse my face red as he lingered over my desk, watching me take notes. I’d ignore the invitations to visit his homeroom after school, written in the upper right-hand corner of my homework assignments, his spidery handwriting creeping across the loose-leaf page. I was fifteen, embarrassed about my budding acne, uncomfortable in my revolting body, and ill-equipped to process adult male attention, which made me feel simultaneously seen and invisible.
My throat found a hum. Handing Aland back his earbud, I told Aland and Rehan that I would see them later and walked out into the mall-lit hall, closing the office door behind me. That door was a portal to a daisy chain of my younger selves who had invested in the transitive nature of trust with varying returns. In high school, two male classmates from highly-respected families, “good kids,” had offered me a ride home from a party, and I wound up with my arms pinned behind my back as they took turns feeling me up. The added bonus was the whispered rumors trailing me down my high school’s hallways like a lingering smell.
My college-aged virgin-self forgave a boyfriend who had sworn I could drink what I wanted when I was with him because he “was never going to initiate sex with me.” His bad boy reputation well-earned, he promised that “if we ever have sex, it will come from you.” Upon our post-Christmas break reunion, I stayed back in his apartment because I had to work at my internship the next morning while he went partying and got completely lit. I awoke to his drunkenly pulling the crotch of my underwear aside and trying to insert himself inside me.
There was the thirty-something-year-old me successfully arguing with a date that “we didn’t really want to have sex because we didn’t really mesh” to get out of his apartment compared to the forty-year-old me who had sex with a date because it was the easiest way to get him out of mine. More than seven years passed since Azaan had been caught and imprisoned. Because individual identity intertwines with sexual identity, were Azaan’s victims able to carve into those years and extricate themselves? I hoped his victims were able to rid themselves of his fingerprints. That, as their lives progressed, they didn’t settle for fast sex, slow love. That none of them had ended up face-down in some trash-strewn back alley. That they hadn’t turned into dust.
*
The day dragged with the weight of newfound knowledge. Finally at home, I turned on my computer and fell down an internet rabbit hole, this one slicked with slime.
Google Search: A pedophile got a job at an elite school in Kurdistan
Google Search: Alexandra Man
Google Search: How do I activate Google Translate?
Google Search: P3 documentary Alexandramannen
Google Search: Books by Katia Wagner
Google Search: Wikipedia Alexandramannen
Google Search: Alexandramannen Lunarstorm
Google Search: Met girls online, ended up with sex abuse
Google Search: Eleven years in prison for the Alexandra man
Google Search: Eleven years for internet rapist
Google Search: Sex offender ‘Alexandra’ has sentenced reduced
Google Search: Alexandra man avoided jail sentence in 2002
Google Search: ‘Internet rapist’ enrolled in computer security class
Google Search: The Alexandra man gets the right to men’s magazines in jail
Google Search: The Alexandra man expelled from Sweden last night
Google Search: He raped girls – does not pay damages to his victims
Google Search: The Alexandra man: a story about the biggest online sex scandal of our time
Sitting at my kitchen counter, I read how Azaan posed online as a twenty-five-year-old female model. His profile picture on LunarStorm, a Swedish social networking site for teens, featured a beautiful young woman named Alexandra, sitting on a sofa in a green sweater. From the early to mid-aughts, Azaan befriended teen girls, chatting with them, gaining their trust, and grooming them under the guise of Alexandra. I could imagine his caring texts, punctuated with winky face or blushing kissy face emojis.
I paused, listening to the mournful Isha call to prayer, and realized that night had blackened the windows. I got up, stretched, snacked, and returned to my computer, where I found more articles detailing how Azaan/Alexandra encouraged the girls to become models. He suggested they could make money by taking pictures of themselves in various stages of undress, assuring them that the more of their bodies they showed, the more money they would make. They could also send videos of themselves via a webcam. As Azaan/Alexandra gained the teens’ trust, he got them to confide their sexual activities, from which he covertly created a database of profiles and added their pictures and videos. Finally, Azaan, still posing as Alexandra, suggested the girls meet her friend FK because he could make them models, and he would pay them for their time. If girls were hesitant to meet FK, Azaan/Alexandra used the pictures and videos they had sent to coerce them.
As FK, Azaan texted and called his victims. He convinced them to come to the city where he lived and booked them tickets to get there. Katie Wagner’s book, The Alexandra Man, details how Azaan met one girl at the airport with a rose in his mouth. The girls probably went looking for awe but found terror.
When the girls arrived, he took them to parking lots, public toilets, or department store cafes, where he pulled down their pants and made them cry. Some he paid for sex; other he raped, but with all, he never used protection. Some of his victims were virgins. A few of them considered suicide after. One thirteen-year-old became pregnant. The youngest victim was twelve years old, the cusp between milk tooth time and womanhood.
What is a just sentence for rape? For the rape of a minor? Of many minors? In the US, we stigmatize women who are not perfect victims. We often label a rape victim such as Megan Waterman, who was raped by serial predator Rex Heuermann, as a sex worker instead of a mother when she was both. Some of Azaan’s victims accepted payments for sexual acts. If he paid an adolescent for a prearranged and rendered service—which did not include intercourse— and then had nonconsensual intercourse with her, was the nonconsensual intercourse an act of rape? Some people may not consider Azaan’s acts of sexual violence illegal.
But the Swedish government did. Azaan was sentenced to eleven years in prison and deportation orders after serving his sentence. On appeal, Azaan’s punishment was reduced to ten years. Ten Years. 58 victims. 62.9 days per victim, except Azaan served a little more than half his sentence before he was repatriated back to Iraq as a free man. He ended up serving approximately 35 days per victim. Five weeks per girl.
How do you quantify the reverberation of sexual violence across a life?
By chance, I met Sahar, a female Iraqi mental health counselor at a flamenco performance in Cadiz, Spain a few years after I left the international school. We bonded because both of us were reading physical books in the audience before the show started. Originally from Baghdad, Sahar fled Iraq during the Gulf War, eventually making her way to Sweden. She finished her education and coincidentally set up her practice in the same city where Azaan had committed his crimes.
“I can’t believe he only got eleven years,” I said a few days later as we sunned ourselves at the beach.
“How many years should he have gotten?” Sahar asked, applying oil to her arms, stomach, and legs.
“I don’t know, but he attacked over 50 girls. Eleven years doesn’t seem like enough.”
“Long jail sentences are cruel, and they don’t help anyone. But in the US, you give out long sentences. Life sentences.”
“Doesn’t Sweden?’
“They’re rare. Other than life, our longest sentence is eighteen years.”
“That’s it?”
“Eighteen years is too long. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, not punish.”
Looking out at the water, I thought about Sahar’s use of the word cruel. “What about mass murderers? Or child killers? ISIS? Don’t they need to be punished?”
“Spending decades in prison won’t make them better people.”
“What if they can’t change? What if, like Azaan, they don’t think they did anything wrong?”
“Anyone can change.”
“I go back and forth on if I think everyone can change.”
“Do you know the term, moral distance?” Sahar propped herself up on her elbows.
“No.”
“It is important to how our prison system is organized. In Sweden, we don’t see criminals as that different from ourselves. The people in prisons look pretty much like the people outside of prisons, including the people who make prison policies. We don’t see a huge moral distance between those who break the law and those who make the law, so our punishments aren’t cruel because theoretically it could be us being punished. Losing your freedom is the punishment, so when people are in prison, we help them. Correctional officers are also social workers. Inmates have access to libraries. They can take university courses and do apprenticeships so they’re ready to re-enter society when they get out.”
“That’s so different from the US.”
Sahar made a compelling argument, but I still was unconvinced about Azaan. Even if he had changed, I didn’t want him working in an environment filled with teenage girls.
Because Azaan’s crime was one of Sweden’s biggest cases of online teen sexual exploitation, journalists kept tabs on him for a few years after his trial. Though their news articles were brief, from my internet sleuthing I learned that Azaan had served his sentence at the Norrtälje prison, whose claim to fame is that one Friday night, the staff forgot to lock up six inmates, three of whom had been convicted of murder. With their chance liberty, the inmates baked a chocolate cake and watched TV.
About a year into his sentence, Azaan applied to Computer Engineering, Information Security and Risk Analysis, a distance learning course offered by Mittuniversitetet in Sundsvall. The course would have taught him about surveillance techniques, data corruption, false users, risk analysis techniques, cryptology, firewalls, and other computer security measures to combat cyber threats. In the end, Azaan couldn’t take the course due to prison restrictions. He did, however, request access to the men’s magazine, Zoo, in his cell. Prison officials denied Azaan’s request, explaining that the magazine was counterproductive to his treatment because it had pornographic elements. Azaan counter-argued that pictures of women in swimsuits were not pornographic. Otherwise, clothing catalogues such as Ahlen’s and Josefsson’s would have to be classified as pornographic too. Azaan won.
While Azaan was on his bogus sick leave from our international school, he taught demonstration classes at another school in Erbil under the pretense of applying for a teaching position. That cold November day in my apartment, he told me that he had gone to the other school to see if there were staff or faculty he could poach. Maybe. Or maybe he wanted fresh hunting grounds.
After our school’s administration realized who Azaan was, they called the authorities, and within a few days, Azaan disappeared. None of the faculty knew for certain what had happened to him, his wife, or his children. The official story was that the Asayish, Kurdistan’s intelligence and special security police, kicked him out of the Kurdish region and back into southern Iraq. We assumed his family went with him. Many faculty members, social Christians from Western democracies, wondered if Azaan had been disappeared by the Asayish or jailed by the Iraqi authorities once he was returned to Baghdad. A few faculty, their lust for justice strong, said they hoped he would be killed. They forgot that Sweden had already punished him.
*
Everyone creates their own fiction. Through a Facebook troll outing Azaan’s newly minted identity, I found Azaan on Instagram. His new name is not that different from his old one. Front and center in Instagram squares, he smiles for the camera, a little older, a little chubbier, a little balder. His profile states he has over 25 years of experience in business management and is highly skilled across the IT spectrum, with “very good strategy-planning experience.” The website linked to his Instagram account is for a cyber security firm, where he refers to himself with the title “Prof. Dr” although my Nancy Drewing suggests he never earned a university degree. According to one of his Instagram highlights, sometime in late 2020, he was part of a Microsoft Engineering team in Turkey. There are several posts of him standing in front of flags with his website’s logo, handing out what look like plaques of achievement to students of all ages. Lying in bed, I stopped scrolling, set the alarm on my phone, and turned off the light, but not my brain.
In the quiet dark, I reached for my phone. A photo of Azaan congratulating a mom caused me to shudder. The mom is holding a toddler as Azaan scrunches his frame closer to the child and makes a funny face. I shook my head at photos of him with young adults, captioned with “Team 2021” or “Team 2020.” One of his posts titled “Travel is the healthiest addiction,” made me sneer. I don’t doubt the rehabilitative prowess of Swedish prisons, and if people change, they deserve a fresh start. But real change requires a shift in mindset, and I am not grief proof.
Honor and shame underpin Iraq’s societal value system. Men’s honor must be protected at all costs, and women are responsible for preserving that honor with their bodies. Attacking a woman’s body dishonors her, her husband (if she has one), and her family. She is better off dead if her virginity is violated or her community suspects her virginity has been violated because without it intact, she has no value. This is the justification for honor killings. Article 409 of Iraq’s Penal Code permits “honor as mitigation for crimes of violence committed against family members,” capping the maximum sentence at three years. A judge has discretionary power to shorten the sentence, but this mercy applies only to men. If a woman kills her husband because he has committed adultery, she will be sentenced to the full penalty under the law, which is fifteen years. Perpetrators of honor killings typically receive six months, if they are sentenced at all. This is the cultural mindset in which Azaan was raised.
Lava*, buried alive by her brothers in the Kurdish mountains for accepting a ride from a male coworker; Tiba Ali, strangled by her father while she was sleeping in his home in Iraq because she wanted to marry for love; Shnyar Hunar, beaten and burned alive by her intoxicated husband after a domestic dispute in Kurdistan—all justified as honor killings of women in a culture where those who make the rules (men) hold a huge moral distance between themselves and those who must follow the rules (women). Azaan is a product of this culture. He thinks women, especially foreign women with whom he decrees “anything goes,” exist for his convenience. In his case, I doubt the Swedish prison system’s rehabilitative treatment upended an ingrained, societal value system which holds a woman responsible for safeguarding her honor, her husband’s honor, her family’s honor, and everybody’s reputation with her body yet denies her agency over that body and full personhood.
*Lava asked reporters not to use her last name out of fear for her safety.
*
“You guys are here early.”
The students nodded their heads without looking up from their computer screens. I had just walked into the upper grades’ English department faculty office, my mind running through the day’s tasks ahead. Our office housed a row of computers for students to use to apply for colleges. Normally, the students congregated in our office between or after their classes to gossip about their other teachers or to pry into our personal lives. They were never this focused unless there was an impending deadline.
“Do they have something due?” I asked Renee, my supervisor. She shook her head, her face an egg. Later, I would wonder if she had known what was coming. During my two years working for her, so often had I seen her play dumb to stay ahead.
I walked over to where my student Hawre was sitting, pulling on a thick pelt of side bangs as he read from his computer screen. “What are you working on?” I asked, stooping to nearsightedly peer over his shoulder, careful not to let specific parts of my upper body brush against his back or shoulder.
Hawre half-turned in his seat. “Miss Alex, do you know Mr. Azaan?’ his cheeks were flushed.
I paused. Azaan, the international school’s IT teacher, had been in my campus apartment a few days earlier, trying to poach me for a job at a Microsoft Future Tech learning hub he was opening in the nearby city of Ankawa. Gossip was rife at the school, and the last thing I wanted was for someone to have seen him entering or exiting my apartment. Azaan had a wife and three kids.
“Sure. He’s a colleague.” I kept my face very still.
Azaan had told me he was about to take a medical leave from the international school, courtesy of a bogus doctor’s note procured with the help of a bribe so he could still earn his teaching salary while he set up the tech hub and got it running. His doctor’s note didn’t extend to his weekend duties proctoring Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams, for which he earned an extra stipend.
“He was in prison in Sweden.” Hawre turned back to the computer, lusty for content.
I wanted to contradict him. How could Azaan have been hired with a prior record? But last term’s scandal—involving one of my supervisors, her falsified credentials, and a prescription pill habit, which she may or may not have asked a student’s pharmacist father to fill—was a fresh memory.
“For what?” I asked.
“For being one of Sweden’s most notorious rapists.” Hawre stumbled over the word notorious.
I swore riotously inside my head. “That can’t be true.”
“It says so here.” Hawre pointed to his computer screen, where the day’s edition of an online newspaper article with the title “A Pedophile Got a Job with an Elite School in Iraqi Kurdistan” was open. Ants crawled on the underside of my skin. I stood up and looked down the row of computers where pictures of Azaan with various unfortunate haircuts lidding his gerbil-like facial features popped from monitors. It was a small consolation that Hawre was reading about whatever this was in English.
Hawre read aloud. “‘One of Sweden’s most notorious rapists who made contact with his victims over the internet’—What does notorious mean?”
“Being famous for something bad.” I held my breath, waiting to see if Hawre would ask what rapist meant. When I’d taught his class The Great Gatsby the term prior, Hawre asked me what Nick meant when he reported that Gatsby “took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously, eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.” When I explained that Nick meant Gatsby had taken Daisy’s virginity, Aryan, another Kurdish student who had been raised in Florida before his family returned to the Kurdish homeland, immediately shot up his hand and asked if I was a virgin as my face lobstered. The school’s biology curriculum barely taught sexual reproduction. Just the week before, a gaggle of giggling eleventh-grade girls had burst into the office, howling over the Lebanese science teacher’s inability to say the letter p in English. “Mr. Edi says benis. Benis!” gasped eleventh-grade Viyan between rifts of laughter. I doubted the curriculum had a unit on consent. I shot Renee a look.
She shuffled over. More tight-lipped than a sphinx, Renee had served in the Canadian Armed Forces, where, allegedly, she had been shot in the line of duty. Her rumored bullet scar and lumbered walk added to her mystique. “What does the article say?” she asked, all naïve and nonchalant.
Hawre continued reading aloud from the screen. “‘One of Sweden’s most notorious rapists...’ Wait, I read that part.” As Hawre’s finger trailed a line of text on the screen, I read the fine print across Renee’s face and wanted to fashion the school’s code of conduct into a baseball bat and smash it against these hallowed walls. The administration must not have learned its lesson from last term’s scandal and failed to run thorough background checks on new employees.
“‘... was sentenced to ten years in a Swedish prison in 2007 after being convicted of carrying out 58 cases of sexual assault against young girls, including 11 counts of rape.’” Hawre interrupted himself. “What’s the difference between assault and rape?”
Gravity got greedier. “Renee?” I volleyed the question to her before escaping down the row of computers, my blood pulsing in my palms. When Azaan had come to my apartment to discuss the job, we’d sat in my living room together. I served us coffee and bottled water. I tried to reconcile the scheming, eye-glass wearing man in a Pillsbury Dough Boy body sitting on my sofa with someone capable of committing close-proximity acts of sexual violence. Azaan wasn’t particularly large or strong; were his victims tiny? He must have forged a sense of trust with them. I thought about the smooth way he justified his fraudulent medical leave while he set up his new business and how I had been half-tempted by his job offer.
“Miss Alex, you have to see this.” Aland, an eleventh-grade scholarship student with shaken-soda energy and a struggling beard waved me over. He sat huddled with Rehan, a soft-spoken son from a less-famous line of the region’s most famous political family, sharing a pair of earbuds. They were listening to something exciting and revelatory, like desire. When I reached their computer, Aland offered me his earbud while Rehan played a video on YouTube. The three of us hunched together like jewelers around the computer monitor.
The video clip featured a younger, thinner, less bald Azaan defending his crimes to an unseen interviewer for a Swedish TV show. “I like teenagers and I paid them,” read the English subtitles. Azaan explained that when he’d arrived in Sweden from his native Iraq, he’d seen a teenage couple making out in a park and thought “anything goes” with women in his newly adopted country. As I listened to Azaan’s justification, an invisible hand pressed on my heartbeat. A few months prior, a man walking past me outside a small Kurdish shop had swiftly thrust his hand out, grabbing my mons pubis hard, and squeezed it. He retracted his hand like a frog retracts its tongue and walked expertly back to his parked car as my Western, male colleague exited the store. The grabber took off as I unfroze and registered what had just happened. Some colleagues thought the violation was my fault because my knee-length, high-neck dress was sleeveless. Others chalked the assault up to my being foreign.
Othering as a justification for sexual violence is an assaultingly neat argument. Dohuk city cab drivers used it to rationalize attacking female Yazidi survivors of ISIS’ genocidal attack on Sinjar and its sex slave markets, figuring that the Yazidi women had already been compromised by ISIS fighters. A government advisor on religious affairs to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) elevated othering to high sparkle. Over watermelon shisha and tequila shots, he mentioned visiting an Ankawa brothel with a group of friends. Right before his lips encircled the plastic, highlighter yellow mouthpiece stuck on the end of the waterpipe, he said he and his friends had shared a thirteen-year-old Arab girl for a few hours. Then, he inhaled luxuriously.
Shock and horror rearranged my face.
He exhaled, and shisha smoke scalloped the edges of our table.
“You seem very pleased with yourself for gang-raping a thirteen-year-old.” Sometimes, you have to lash out just to breathe.
“Of course, I am. With a group, it was very cheap.”
I flared like a smeared firefly. Clinging to the fact that this minister of religious affairs lived for shock value, I hoped he was putting me on. In his cocaine-fueled youth, he had fronted a Wham! cover band, singing in London nightclubs, loud and humid, releasing stale gusts of sweat and booze.
“I’m surprised you chose an Arab girl,” I prodded.
“Of course, I chose a foreign girl. Who do you think works in the brothels?” He held the water pipe close to his mouth as if he might fellate it.
I changed tactics, trying to break him. “Thirteen is just a little older than your daughter.”
The look he shot me left an exit wound.
“Who went first?” I pressed.
“I did, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Ask Carl the next time you see him. He was there.”
My shoulders shuddered with an urge to icky-dance. Carl was his cousin who sometimes joined us for nights out when he was in town from Dubai. “In the room watching?”
“In the next room, waiting his turn.”
“That poor girl.”
“She enjoyed herself.”
“Now I know you’re lying.”
“For God’s sake.” His swears sounded like prayers. “I’m facilitating an important service. How else is she going to make a living?”
“She shouldn’t be working. She should be in school.”
“Idiot!” his voice creaked as his lungs hung onto the harsh, fragrant smoke. “What do you think happened to young Iraqi girls after your country invaded?”
“Miss Alex?” Aland’s voice pulled me back into the present. He and Rehan were watching me, waiting for my reaction. From being my students, they knew I was an outspoken advocate of women’s rights, an icepack against a bruise.
I gritted my teeth and channeled a gracious Juliette Binoche. “How did you find out about this?” I asked, while inside, I was a snarling dog. How did the students know before the faculty did? In the days to come, the administration would never acknowledge the incident to the faculty, nor did they issue any guidelines on how to talk to our students about it.
“Tofiq’s father recognized Mr. Azaan when he dropped Tofiq off for his practice TOEFL last weekend,” Aland answered as Rehan left YouTube and surfed the internet. “Then he called the other parents to let them know, and then his father called the school.”
Later, when this story was officially told by the school’s administration, they would claim to have recognized Azaan and promptly fired him, and then they notified all the parents.
“How did Tofiq’s father know Azaan?” I asked, my contained temper a few degrees below heatstroke.
“His father saw him on TV in Sweden.”
Tofiq and his family had returned to the Kurdish capital from Sweden, part of the diaspora coming home to restart their lives in the region’s prosperous safety. If a family had owned land before they fled the violence plaguing Kurdistan from the late 1980s through the early aughts, by the time they returned, that land ownership had made them wealthy. Violence engulfed Iraq, a byproduct of the US invasion, making the Kurdish north, with its large oil and gas reserves, mountains, and more temperate climate, desirable. I taught a pair of Kurdish sisters who had recently returned from Michigan, where their father ran a gas station and convenience store outside a depressed city. Now, they lived in a neo-classical style mansion inside a newly built gated community.
My eyes swept the office. My female students’ faces were contorted and exposed by concentration. Some of them had drawn together in pairs. They talked quietly, their mouths hidden behind hand canopies, their eyes occasionally flicking around the room. Other faces were theaters of implicit emotions, curtained by long, dark hair. A few were twirling their hair as they scrolled and read. Had Azaan slipped into the cracks of their thoughts? If so, were certain moments strobing on and off in their minds like a broken flashlight? Did they blame themselves for enjoying the spotlight of his attention, or were they recasting past events to uproot the seeds of fresh disaster? Were the one or two sitting on their hands, hurting?
A big feeling, numb and shapeless, took over me. I was back in my own suburban high school, with a biology teacher named Mr. Dott, whose black, short-cropped beard and mustache were a reverse image of the patchy baldness stalking the top of his head. He used to interrupt his own lectures to point out how my eyes matched my sweater or comment on their blueness to the class. Heat would creep up my neck and rinse my face red as he lingered over my desk, watching me take notes. I’d ignore the invitations to visit his homeroom after school, written in the upper right-hand corner of my homework assignments, his spidery handwriting creeping across the loose-leaf page. I was fifteen, embarrassed about my budding acne, uncomfortable in my revolting body, and ill-equipped to process adult male attention, which made me feel simultaneously seen and invisible.
My throat found a hum. Handing Aland back his earbud, I told Aland and Rehan that I would see them later and walked out into the mall-lit hall, closing the office door behind me. That door was a portal to a daisy chain of my younger selves who had invested in the transitive nature of trust with varying returns. In high school, two male classmates from highly-respected families, “good kids,” had offered me a ride home from a party, and I wound up with my arms pinned behind my back as they took turns feeling me up. The added bonus was the whispered rumors trailing me down my high school’s hallways like a lingering smell.
My college-aged virgin-self forgave a boyfriend who had sworn I could drink what I wanted when I was with him because he “was never going to initiate sex with me.” His bad boy reputation well-earned, he promised that “if we ever have sex, it will come from you.” Upon our post-Christmas break reunion, I stayed back in his apartment because I had to work at my internship the next morning while he went partying and got completely lit. I awoke to his drunkenly pulling the crotch of my underwear aside and trying to insert himself inside me.
There was the thirty-something-year-old me successfully arguing with a date that “we didn’t really want to have sex because we didn’t really mesh” to get out of his apartment compared to the forty-year-old me who had sex with a date because it was the easiest way to get him out of mine. More than seven years passed since Azaan had been caught and imprisoned. Because individual identity intertwines with sexual identity, were Azaan’s victims able to carve into those years and extricate themselves? I hoped his victims were able to rid themselves of his fingerprints. That, as their lives progressed, they didn’t settle for fast sex, slow love. That none of them had ended up face-down in some trash-strewn back alley. That they hadn’t turned into dust.
*
The day dragged with the weight of newfound knowledge. Finally at home, I turned on my computer and fell down an internet rabbit hole, this one slicked with slime.
Google Search: A pedophile got a job at an elite school in Kurdistan
Google Search: Alexandra Man
Google Search: How do I activate Google Translate?
Google Search: P3 documentary Alexandramannen
Google Search: Books by Katia Wagner
Google Search: Wikipedia Alexandramannen
Google Search: Alexandramannen Lunarstorm
Google Search: Met girls online, ended up with sex abuse
Google Search: Eleven years in prison for the Alexandra man
Google Search: Eleven years for internet rapist
Google Search: Sex offender ‘Alexandra’ has sentenced reduced
Google Search: Alexandra man avoided jail sentence in 2002
Google Search: ‘Internet rapist’ enrolled in computer security class
Google Search: The Alexandra man gets the right to men’s magazines in jail
Google Search: The Alexandra man expelled from Sweden last night
Google Search: He raped girls – does not pay damages to his victims
Google Search: The Alexandra man: a story about the biggest online sex scandal of our time
Sitting at my kitchen counter, I read how Azaan posed online as a twenty-five-year-old female model. His profile picture on LunarStorm, a Swedish social networking site for teens, featured a beautiful young woman named Alexandra, sitting on a sofa in a green sweater. From the early to mid-aughts, Azaan befriended teen girls, chatting with them, gaining their trust, and grooming them under the guise of Alexandra. I could imagine his caring texts, punctuated with winky face or blushing kissy face emojis.
I paused, listening to the mournful Isha call to prayer, and realized that night had blackened the windows. I got up, stretched, snacked, and returned to my computer, where I found more articles detailing how Azaan/Alexandra encouraged the girls to become models. He suggested they could make money by taking pictures of themselves in various stages of undress, assuring them that the more of their bodies they showed, the more money they would make. They could also send videos of themselves via a webcam. As Azaan/Alexandra gained the teens’ trust, he got them to confide their sexual activities, from which he covertly created a database of profiles and added their pictures and videos. Finally, Azaan, still posing as Alexandra, suggested the girls meet her friend FK because he could make them models, and he would pay them for their time. If girls were hesitant to meet FK, Azaan/Alexandra used the pictures and videos they had sent to coerce them.
As FK, Azaan texted and called his victims. He convinced them to come to the city where he lived and booked them tickets to get there. Katie Wagner’s book, The Alexandra Man, details how Azaan met one girl at the airport with a rose in his mouth. The girls probably went looking for awe but found terror.
When the girls arrived, he took them to parking lots, public toilets, or department store cafes, where he pulled down their pants and made them cry. Some he paid for sex; other he raped, but with all, he never used protection. Some of his victims were virgins. A few of them considered suicide after. One thirteen-year-old became pregnant. The youngest victim was twelve years old, the cusp between milk tooth time and womanhood.
What is a just sentence for rape? For the rape of a minor? Of many minors? In the US, we stigmatize women who are not perfect victims. We often label a rape victim such as Megan Waterman, who was raped by serial predator Rex Heuermann, as a sex worker instead of a mother when she was both. Some of Azaan’s victims accepted payments for sexual acts. If he paid an adolescent for a prearranged and rendered service—which did not include intercourse— and then had nonconsensual intercourse with her, was the nonconsensual intercourse an act of rape? Some people may not consider Azaan’s acts of sexual violence illegal.
But the Swedish government did. Azaan was sentenced to eleven years in prison and deportation orders after serving his sentence. On appeal, Azaan’s punishment was reduced to ten years. Ten Years. 58 victims. 62.9 days per victim, except Azaan served a little more than half his sentence before he was repatriated back to Iraq as a free man. He ended up serving approximately 35 days per victim. Five weeks per girl.
How do you quantify the reverberation of sexual violence across a life?
By chance, I met Sahar, a female Iraqi mental health counselor at a flamenco performance in Cadiz, Spain a few years after I left the international school. We bonded because both of us were reading physical books in the audience before the show started. Originally from Baghdad, Sahar fled Iraq during the Gulf War, eventually making her way to Sweden. She finished her education and coincidentally set up her practice in the same city where Azaan had committed his crimes.
“I can’t believe he only got eleven years,” I said a few days later as we sunned ourselves at the beach.
“How many years should he have gotten?” Sahar asked, applying oil to her arms, stomach, and legs.
“I don’t know, but he attacked over 50 girls. Eleven years doesn’t seem like enough.”
“Long jail sentences are cruel, and they don’t help anyone. But in the US, you give out long sentences. Life sentences.”
“Doesn’t Sweden?’
“They’re rare. Other than life, our longest sentence is eighteen years.”
“That’s it?”
“Eighteen years is too long. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, not punish.”
Looking out at the water, I thought about Sahar’s use of the word cruel. “What about mass murderers? Or child killers? ISIS? Don’t they need to be punished?”
“Spending decades in prison won’t make them better people.”
“What if they can’t change? What if, like Azaan, they don’t think they did anything wrong?”
“Anyone can change.”
“I go back and forth on if I think everyone can change.”
“Do you know the term, moral distance?” Sahar propped herself up on her elbows.
“No.”
“It is important to how our prison system is organized. In Sweden, we don’t see criminals as that different from ourselves. The people in prisons look pretty much like the people outside of prisons, including the people who make prison policies. We don’t see a huge moral distance between those who break the law and those who make the law, so our punishments aren’t cruel because theoretically it could be us being punished. Losing your freedom is the punishment, so when people are in prison, we help them. Correctional officers are also social workers. Inmates have access to libraries. They can take university courses and do apprenticeships so they’re ready to re-enter society when they get out.”
“That’s so different from the US.”
Sahar made a compelling argument, but I still was unconvinced about Azaan. Even if he had changed, I didn’t want him working in an environment filled with teenage girls.
Because Azaan’s crime was one of Sweden’s biggest cases of online teen sexual exploitation, journalists kept tabs on him for a few years after his trial. Though their news articles were brief, from my internet sleuthing I learned that Azaan had served his sentence at the Norrtälje prison, whose claim to fame is that one Friday night, the staff forgot to lock up six inmates, three of whom had been convicted of murder. With their chance liberty, the inmates baked a chocolate cake and watched TV.
About a year into his sentence, Azaan applied to Computer Engineering, Information Security and Risk Analysis, a distance learning course offered by Mittuniversitetet in Sundsvall. The course would have taught him about surveillance techniques, data corruption, false users, risk analysis techniques, cryptology, firewalls, and other computer security measures to combat cyber threats. In the end, Azaan couldn’t take the course due to prison restrictions. He did, however, request access to the men’s magazine, Zoo, in his cell. Prison officials denied Azaan’s request, explaining that the magazine was counterproductive to his treatment because it had pornographic elements. Azaan counter-argued that pictures of women in swimsuits were not pornographic. Otherwise, clothing catalogues such as Ahlen’s and Josefsson’s would have to be classified as pornographic too. Azaan won.
While Azaan was on his bogus sick leave from our international school, he taught demonstration classes at another school in Erbil under the pretense of applying for a teaching position. That cold November day in my apartment, he told me that he had gone to the other school to see if there were staff or faculty he could poach. Maybe. Or maybe he wanted fresh hunting grounds.
After our school’s administration realized who Azaan was, they called the authorities, and within a few days, Azaan disappeared. None of the faculty knew for certain what had happened to him, his wife, or his children. The official story was that the Asayish, Kurdistan’s intelligence and special security police, kicked him out of the Kurdish region and back into southern Iraq. We assumed his family went with him. Many faculty members, social Christians from Western democracies, wondered if Azaan had been disappeared by the Asayish or jailed by the Iraqi authorities once he was returned to Baghdad. A few faculty, their lust for justice strong, said they hoped he would be killed. They forgot that Sweden had already punished him.
*
Everyone creates their own fiction. Through a Facebook troll outing Azaan’s newly minted identity, I found Azaan on Instagram. His new name is not that different from his old one. Front and center in Instagram squares, he smiles for the camera, a little older, a little chubbier, a little balder. His profile states he has over 25 years of experience in business management and is highly skilled across the IT spectrum, with “very good strategy-planning experience.” The website linked to his Instagram account is for a cyber security firm, where he refers to himself with the title “Prof. Dr” although my Nancy Drewing suggests he never earned a university degree. According to one of his Instagram highlights, sometime in late 2020, he was part of a Microsoft Engineering team in Turkey. There are several posts of him standing in front of flags with his website’s logo, handing out what look like plaques of achievement to students of all ages. Lying in bed, I stopped scrolling, set the alarm on my phone, and turned off the light, but not my brain.
In the quiet dark, I reached for my phone. A photo of Azaan congratulating a mom caused me to shudder. The mom is holding a toddler as Azaan scrunches his frame closer to the child and makes a funny face. I shook my head at photos of him with young adults, captioned with “Team 2021” or “Team 2020.” One of his posts titled “Travel is the healthiest addiction,” made me sneer. I don’t doubt the rehabilitative prowess of Swedish prisons, and if people change, they deserve a fresh start. But real change requires a shift in mindset, and I am not grief proof.
Honor and shame underpin Iraq’s societal value system. Men’s honor must be protected at all costs, and women are responsible for preserving that honor with their bodies. Attacking a woman’s body dishonors her, her husband (if she has one), and her family. She is better off dead if her virginity is violated or her community suspects her virginity has been violated because without it intact, she has no value. This is the justification for honor killings. Article 409 of Iraq’s Penal Code permits “honor as mitigation for crimes of violence committed against family members,” capping the maximum sentence at three years. A judge has discretionary power to shorten the sentence, but this mercy applies only to men. If a woman kills her husband because he has committed adultery, she will be sentenced to the full penalty under the law, which is fifteen years. Perpetrators of honor killings typically receive six months, if they are sentenced at all. This is the cultural mindset in which Azaan was raised.
Lava*, buried alive by her brothers in the Kurdish mountains for accepting a ride from a male coworker; Tiba Ali, strangled by her father while she was sleeping in his home in Iraq because she wanted to marry for love; Shnyar Hunar, beaten and burned alive by her intoxicated husband after a domestic dispute in Kurdistan—all justified as honor killings of women in a culture where those who make the rules (men) hold a huge moral distance between themselves and those who must follow the rules (women). Azaan is a product of this culture. He thinks women, especially foreign women with whom he decrees “anything goes,” exist for his convenience. In his case, I doubt the Swedish prison system’s rehabilitative treatment upended an ingrained, societal value system which holds a woman responsible for safeguarding her honor, her husband’s honor, her family’s honor, and everybody’s reputation with her body yet denies her agency over that body and full personhood.
*Lava asked reporters not to use her last name out of fear for her safety.
This essay is included in the upcoming book Breakfast Wine, to be published by Apprentice House Press in May 2025.
Alex Poppe is the author of four works of literary fiction: Duende was a 2024 American Book Fest Legacy Award winner, a 2023 International Book Awards winner, and a 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Awards finalist. Jinwar and Other Stories won the 2023 Spring Readers’ Choice Book Award and was a 2022 International Book Awards finalist. In 2018, Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, Eric Hoffer Grand Prize finalist, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards.
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Liz Nakazawa is an American poet, playwright and photographer. Her poems, haiku and photographs have appeared in The Timberline Review, Rock and Sling, ahundredgourds, The Poeming Pigeon, The Amethyst Review and other publications. She has published two poetry anthologies: Deer Drink the Moon: Poems of Oregon (Ooligan Press, 2007) and The Knotted Bond: Oregon Poets Speak of Their Sisters (Uttered Chaos Press, 2018). She has also published a collection of her own poetry, Pulse and Weave (Flowstone Press, 2022). She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
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