Easy money means more people lease cars rather than buy them and trade them rather than repair them. He says the auto sales and repair business is tough these days. He was drawn to the Kurdish community in Moorhead-Fargo and eventually made his home there. He longed for a smaller town where he could more easily establish himself and so lived in Sioux Falls for four years. He and his brothers first arrived in Nashville, where exists to this day a large community of expat Kurds. Salman, owner of A&R Auto Sales and Repair in West Fargo, fled Iraq in 1988, lived for four years in a migrant camp in Turkey, then emigrated to the United States. Most, like business owner Talib “Tony” Salman, left their homes after Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on the Kurds in the late 1980s. While the hope of political independence is dim today in Turkey and Iran, the Kurdish militia is active in the Syrian civil war while their greatest hope and greatest frustration for independence comes in post-Saddam Iraq, where Kurds have voted for an independence that has remained elusive.Ĭhrah Maii But American intervention in Iraq wasn’t the catalyst for most of the Kurdish migration to the U.S. Political divisions created at the end of World War I left the Kurds without a homeland. Many of the 1,000 people or so of Kurdish descent who live in the Fargo-Moorhead area were either born in the United States or immigrated from the traditional Kurdish homeland, which encompasses parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

What does “even more” entail? Maii’s goal is to achieve a dual major in neuroscience and biology en route to becoming a pediatric oncologist. Me, being born in the U.S., I believe I could do even more.” Here’s a guy who was born over there, came over here and is making a name for himself, running for mayor. Brifki’s run for mayor has not gone unnoticed by Maii.

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