A BUTCHER FROM BAGHDAD.(Iraqis in the US)

On a normal night, the water-pipe smokers and Arab-coffee drinkers and cardplayers at the Ya Liel Ya Eien cafe, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, start to clear out at around seven or eight. But by 10 p.m. last Thursday, with the big-screen television in the back of the brightly lit room showing Al Jazeera all the time, none of the twenty or so customers seemed remotely interested in going home. At the table closest to the screen, a Yemeni dressmaker, a Palestinian flea-market peddler, and a Jordanian graduate student were staring at footage of a bombed Baghdad neighborhood and occasionally releasing clouds of smoke scented with honey and apple. "Why this war, and what kind of war will be clean war?"Adel Habbas, the Palestinian, asked. "I never in my life see clean war.”

The men at the table opposed the war, more in sadness than in anger--though in the same breath they all wondered why America didn't get rid of their dictators. "I would like to see a different President every four years in the Arab world, you know?"Habbas said.

One table over, a young man sat by himself. Slender, with chiselled features and sad glittering eyes, he hadn't taken off his black nylon coat, as if at any moment he might have to bolt. He was chain-smoking Marlboro Lights and chewing on the corner of a plastic bag as he glanced nervously at the screen. He gave his name as Ali Hassan, and said that he was a butcher from Baghdad.

In 1984, when he was fifteen, his father, who was also a butcher, was arrested by Saddam Hussein's security police for making some careless comment about the regime. Three months later, the remains of the body, which had been fed through a meat grinder, were returned to Hassan's family with a demand for a thousand dinars for the trouble. In August of 1990, Hassan found himself conscripted into Saddam's Army and was sent into Kuwait. He and three comrades managed to desert their unit in the first week of the occupation. After walking all night, they wound up in Saudi Arabia, where Hassan eventually turned himself over to coalition troops. "And they give me to Nebraska.”

By 1994, Hassan had a job at a meatpacking plant in the town of Schuyler. "Very boring in Nebraska,"he said. "And too much cold."But at the gaming tables there he acquired a talent for roulette; a few years ago, when he moved to Brooklyn and began working at a Bay Ridge butcher shop, Hassan transferred his operations to Atlantic City. For the past few weeks, though, he hasn't been able to bring himself to go.

Within two hours of President Bush's ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq, no one was answering the phone at Hassan's mother's house, near downtown Baghdad. His nine sisters, along with their husbands and children, were also in hiding somewhere. Since the start of the war, Hassan has heard nothing from any ...