Byline: SAM HOWE VERHOVEK - New York Times
Taha A. deserted the Iraqi army during the invasion of Kuwait and was sentenced to death for helping Kuwaiti families go into hiding, according to the execution warrant he keeps as a macabre memento. He escaped into Saudi Arabia, where he spent two and a half years in what he calls the "desert hell" of a refugee camp.
So when the ex-soldier, 30, stepped off an airplane here this summer and started work as a check-out clerk at a 7-Eleven convenience store, things seemed to be looking up. At least until one recent day, when he noticed twocustomers gesturing toward him and heard one of them grumbling about the "stinking enemy."
As he resettles here at the American government's expense and under terms of a 1975 refugee-protection law, Taha is just one of hundreds of former Iraqi soldiers who find themselves in the crossfire of an increasingly bitter debate over whether they should have been allowed in this country at …
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