MIAMI – He smiled and looked a little tired, more like a kid who just flew home from college than a 16-year-old returning from a secret, life-threatening trip to Baghdad.
He offered no explanations to the hordes of media jockeying for his attention. And if he apologized to his parents for scaring them, he did so in private.
Farris Hassan, the Fort Lauderdale boy who left for Baghdad without his parents’ permission and spent two weeks in the Middle East before being taken into custody by U.S. officials, returned home to South Florida on Sunday night, landing at Miami International Airport about 7:30 p.m.
Relieved family and tense airport security guards quickly surrounded him, whisking him past reporters and into a black car that drove him away to an undisclosed location for the night.
Later, the boy told The Associated Press: “I do want to tell you how flattered I am. The media has been very, very kind to me. I hope to get a good night’s rest.”
The boy’s mother, Shatha Atiya, asked for privacy.
“I just want to hug him and put my arms around him, take him home and thank God he is alive,” she said.
The teen’s journey has been anything but private for the last week.
It became world news after Hassan walked into a Baghdad war zone office of The Associated Press news agency on Tuesday, stunning editors, who called the U.S. Embassy, which sent him home.
Hassan’s adventure began two weeks prior to that, after he bought a plane ticket to Kuwait City with his own money and attempted to take a taxi into Iraq, leaving only an e-mail to family and his school, explaining that he wanted to witness the country’s struggle for democracy firsthand. After he couldn’t get over the border because of extra election security, he stayed with family friends for a week in Beirut before successfully flying to Baghdad.
His story sparked intense media interest and debate among his classmates at Pine Crest School, an exclusive college preparatory, where he is a junior and straight-A student who has studied immersion journalism and often debates fellow students on issues of politics and religion.
They wondered: Was Hassan – the American-born son of Iraqi immigrants and a rich kid who got a $50,000 car for his 16th birthday – an example of a selfless youth who cared more about other’s suffering than his own comfortable life here? Or was he a reckless teenager who pulled a stunt that could have gotten him killed?
The teen’s older brother, Hayder Hassan, 23, thinks his brother is a bit of both. A few days earlier, he vowed to give him a “whoopin’ when he came home.” But on Sunday, he was tender.
“Everybody needs to remember that he’s a kid, he’s been through a lot, and he’s exhausted,” the brother said. “He said all he wants to do is sleep.”
Hassan’s mother said she had talked to her son from an airport earlier in the day – his journey home began Friday and included a connecting flight through Amsterdam – and said he didn’t sound good.
“I am concerned about how he sounded. Once he’s home and we sit down and talk as a family, we’ll go from there,” she said. “I have to evaluate his well-being first.”
Hassan appeared well as he left the airport later that night. He wore a brown and yellow striped polo shirt, jeans, sneakers and a backpack. His brothers seemed more annoyed at the TV cameras being stuck in his face than he did. Other passengers looked confused, and a bit concerned, at why such a normal-looking teen was generating so much attention. After Hassan entered the sedan that would take him away, he gave the driver a big hug.
Questions still unanswered: What made him take such a risk? What did he see and do while overseas? What did he learn, and was it worth it?
(EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)
Media camped outside the homes of both Hassan’s mother and father – his parents are divorced; she lives in Fort Lauderdale, he in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea – hoping for an interview. At his mother’s mansion near the Intracoastal, reporters and camera crews milled about, talking on cell phones, writing in notebooks and chatting. TV trucks lined the street, and reporters sat in canvas folding chairs erected at the ends of driveways lined with fancy pavers.
Neighbor Prince Mongo, who has known the Hassan family for years, loved the hubbub.
“People are all excited,” he said. “I think (the teen) had a mission to go on. It was a heroic and stupid thing at the same time.”
Resident Klaus Kobold disagreed.
“I think it’s just nonsense what the kid did,” he said.
(END OPTIONAL TRIM)
Family members promised that Hassan, independent as ever, would respond for himself in his own good time.
—
(c) 2006 South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Visit the Sun-Sentinel on the World Wide Web at http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
AP-NY-01-01-06 2232EST
Comments are no longer available on this story