Mennonite Weekly Review

HESSTON, Kan. — Sadi Othman, a civilian contractor in Iraq since 2003 and a 1993 graduate of Hesston College, has received a Civilian Award for Humanitarian Service from the U.S. Army for his role in defusing a dangerous hostage situation involving Iraq and Turkey.

The award, given Nov. 26, states that Othman, senior adviser to Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, “was personally responsible for the safe return of eight Turkish hostages from the Kurdistan Workers Party [PKK] back to the Turkish army, and as a result potentially [defused] an international armed conflict.”

The eight Turkish soldiers had been seized Oct. 21 in a cross-border ambush by the PKK guerrillas, who seek a homeland in southern Turkey. Shortly after the PKK ambush, which also killed 12 Turkish soldiers, Turkey’s military began massing troops on the Turkey-Iraq border in preparation for military action inside Iraq.

Othman said he was part of a group that included U.S. military and civilian leaders, Iraqi central government officials and leaders of the Kurdish Regional Government, or KRG, which worked intensively to resolve the crisis as quickly as possible. Othman was asked by Petraeus to take over contacts with some of the key leaders, particularly those in Iraqi Kurdistan, the northern region where Othman worked as a linguist and adviser in 2003 and 2004.

According to the award’s citation, Othman “began a relentless campaign of engagements with Iraqi leaders, the KRG and Kurdish Peshmerga [military] generals.”

The award cites Othman’s efforts as “resulting in successfully getting all parties to agree to terms to release the Turkish soldiers. Additionally, [he] engaged both the KRG president and KRG prime minister about using the positive outcome of the hostage crisis as a catalyst to bring a permanent solution to the PKK issue.”

“It was a team effort,” Othman said. “It took trust on the part of everyone involved to gain the release of the hostages.”

A Palestinian-American, Othman’s U.S. residence is in Queens, N.Y. As senior adviser to Petraeus, Othman is in his fourth civilian assignment in Iraq in which he has served as linguist and adviser to top U.S. military leaders.

“The type of contacts we made, under the leadership of Gen. Petraeus, to resolve this hostage crisis, is the sort of thing we do day after day here in Iraq,” he said. “We work hard at making improvements in the situation at all levels … at the grassroots level, at the national level and at the regional level. It’s an extremely demanding and exhausting task. But I continue to do this work because I want to help the Iraqi people.”