My friends story made front page news today!

[TraceOneInfinite Flat Earther 96']

I'm the "roomate...Brian" who is quoted in the article.  Brian is my real name, Ibrahim is my Muslim nickname.  My friend has been stuck in Libya without internet access since the conflict began and the State Department was blowing him off, so he asked me to do whatever I could to gain publicity for his story, in an effort to put pressure on the State Department.  And it is working because now they are giving him a lot of attention since the Kansas city Star contacted their offices about this story.  They are apologetic to him and trying to get him out of the country.  Here is a link to the story from today's paper and I also copied and pasted the article.  I'm the one who contacted the Star about the story and coordinated between them and my friend and his brother and much of the information is what I related to them.

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http://www.kansascity.com/2011/07/17/3020519/former-kc-area-resident-trapped.html

Former KC area resident trapped in Libya
By MATT PEARCE
The Kansas City Star
Via the Internet, Loueyee El-busefi of Overland Park tries to keep track of his brother who’s trapped in Libya.
FRED BLOCHER
Via the Internet, Loueyee El-busefi of Overland Park tries to keep track of his brother who’s trapped in Libya.
Morad Elbusefi used to post updates to his Facebook page before the revolution.



Morad Elbusefi doesn’t use his full name when he calls.

He calls himself “Moe” instead. He’s polite. He says there are limits on what he can and can’t say.

Until recently, the 30-year-old lived and worked in the Kansas City area. He delivered pizzas here, drove trucks here, bused tables here, went to Johnson County Community College. He worked and read like crazy. An ambitious guy, a smart guy, he hatched a plan to strike it big and moved away.

Now he’s trapped in Libya, and he can’t get out.

For months, Elbusefi — a Libyan-American and a U.S. citizen by birth — has been hiding in territory controlled by Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi, trying to avoid nosy soldiers, NATO air strikes and Gadhafi’s secret police.

For part of this month, he was in Tripoli, the capital.

“I’m in almost like a garage that has been modified to become living quarters,” Elbusefi said July 9, describing one of his temporary locations. He shared it with rats and insects. “A nasty place to live in.”

In a written statement, the U.S. State Department did not comment on Elbusefi’s case or provide an estimate on how many Americans are still in Libya, other than to say it had helped “hundreds” of citizens since the uprisings began in February.

It confirmed that it was trying to help six Americans “missing or presumed detained,” but said that as with every other country, “we do not track the whereabouts of individual U.S. citizens traveling in Libya.”

While the State Department said it did not think Americans were being specifically targeted by Gadhafi or the rebels, Libyan-Americans interviewed by The Star worried for Elbusefi’s safety. Talking to Americans has resulted in kidnappings by Gadhafi’s men, they said, and being an American heightens the danger.

Elbusefi said the State Department hasn’t been very helpful. He hopes media attention will put pressure on the government to do more.

So he has taken the risk and agreed to have his name published for this story.

“It has to be done,” Elbusefi said. “I’m out of options.”

• • •

Elbusefi was born in 1981 in Columbus, Ohio, where his father was studying at Ohio State University to become a dentist. The family returned to Libya a few years later, and his father became a minister of health in the southern Libyan town of Sabha.

During Elbusefi’s childhood, Gadhafi was already enjoying the long summer of his reign, having swept to power in 1969.

Elbusefi was an individualist, maybe too opinionated for his country; in high school, he said, he co-published a critical magazine that riled the school’s principal — perhaps because he kept posting it on the wall across from the principal’s office.

“I grew up resenting the inability to dissent,” Elbusefi wrote in a recent blog post, when he found rare access to the Internet. “I loathed, as I still do, oppression in all its forms, and I was not the least bit shy of sharing my angry sentiments with others.”

Elbusefi decided in 1999 that he was going to leave Gadhafi’s Libya.

“He came to me in the dormitories and said, ‘Everything is going bad, worse than before,’ ” said Morad’s older brother, Loueyee El-busefi, who was studying to be a doctor at the time. (Loueyee uses a hyphen in his last name.) Morad wanted to go back to America, but he didn’t have his U.S. passport, and Libyan-American diplomatic relations then were at a low point. “I said, ‘You’re dreaming. How are you going to get there?’ He said, ‘You’ll see.’ ”

Loueyee gave Morad his entire month’s worth of scholarship money, which Morad used as the magic hat to pull off his David Copperfield act: He went to neighboring Tunisia, got a copy of his birth certificate from the United States, got a valid passport and bought a plane ticket to New York City — where he didn’t know anybody, didn’t have a place to stay, didn’t have a clue where he’d work, and certainly didn’t have enough money to survive homeless, jobless and friendless in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

You’ll see.

• • •

Morad Elbusefi eventually ended up in Johnson County in 2001 and bounced around jobs for much of a decade; he remained restless and ambitious. His wanderlust eventually carried him in 2007 to California, where he thought about going to school. In 2009, a friend offered him a potentially lucrative job with a Libyan oil company.

He thought about it. He saw Gadhafi on “Larry King Live,” looking older and more mortal. Maybe things would be different. Elbusefi decided he would go back, and on Jan. 25, 2010, he did.

A year later, the Arab Spring ignited in North Africa, the oil company disappeared overnight, and NATO bombs began rattling Morad Elbusefi’s windows. Suddenly, a second great escape from Libya became necessary, starting on a similar flight path as his first: Get to Tunisia. But it’s a different Libya these days — like a real-life “Casablanca” but with more shooting, where exits often depend on having cash and some tenuous I-know-a-guy-who-knows-a-guy connections.

“It’s terrible,” Elbusefi said. “Really terrible. Like nothing I’ve seen before.”

He’s out of Tripoli now; the U.S. State Department had recommended he try getting help from the Hungarian embassy, but on July 10, they turned him back at the gates.

So, last week he hitchhiked more than 100 miles on an unstriped highway across the desert to stay with a friend in a small tribal village, where he’s waiting for a break in the fighting to the west and a clear shot to the border.

The State Department, which abandoned its embassy in Tripoli and whose presence in the country has since evaporated, has been coordinating some of its evacuation efforts with countries such as Turkey.

They’re not the only ones working from a distance.

• • •

In Kansas City, Kan., half a world away, Loueyee El-busefi is watching over his little brother.

“I’m worried about him,” Loueyee said from behind the counter at the Stop and Shop near 39th Street and State Line Road, the convenience store where he works. There’s a computer next to the register, where a tangle of Arabic piles up on his Facebook page, the war coming at him in incoherent shreds of rumor and shaky cell phone footage. A year older than Morad, he’d followed his little brother to America in 2001.

In Loueyee’s immaculate apartment in Overland Park, his wife often pores over footage from Misurata, where her family was trapped for weeks amid some of the war’s most desperate fighting. She said she did not want her name printed because she fears reprisals against members of her family still in Gadhafi-held territory.

She called up a YouTube video that shows the bodies of a well-known family in Misurata. She cried when she first saw it. She admitted watching it four times. Loueyee has seen it twice.

“One day she saw her family’s house on Facebook, people fighting in the street,” Loueyee said. He paused. “She almost got crazy that day.”

Her family calls her, sometimes bringing nightmarish news of rape and death. She cries, often. During the hardest fighting in March and April, she was unable to reach them for 21 agonizing days.

The stress has clearly worn on Loueyee, who holds two part-time jobs, takes classes at Johnson County Community College and is the father of a spunky 4-year-old girl.

“I have to wait until two or three o’clock in the morning to talk to (Morad),” Loueyee said last week. “I need to hear his voice.”

Loueyee supports the revolution; instead of running guns, he runs minutes. Last month, he organized other Kansas City Libyans to help buy time on satellite phones that rebels, doctors and families could use to get out news from the front lines. Information is life.

All while making calls to friends in Libya, making connections for Morad.

He found a revolutionary on Facebook to smuggle Morad out of the country — but then the man died in some fighting. Loueyee didn’t want anyone to think that Morad was tied to a rebel, and on the phone, Loueyee told Morad that the man died of a heart attack, hoping his brother could read his voice, hoping Morad would secretly understand.

Loueyee was afraid that somebody else was listening.

• • •

On Feb. 13, shortly before the revolution, some of Gadhafi’s men detained Morad Elbusefi while he was jogging through a suburban area in Sabha. A soldier began asking personal questions: Are you a Muslim? Do you bring girls to your apartment?

Another Libyan might have answered him. Elbusefi said he wouldn’t. It didn’t go well.

“He stood up, and violently closed the door of the office, turned off the TV, and got right in my face and yelled as loud as he could that I am being interrogated and that I am to answer the questions,” Elbusefi said.

They moved him to a small room for the rest of the day, without food or drink, and forced him to sit on a single two-by-four. They asked him about every foreign number in his cell phone before releasing him. Elbusefi said he felt vulnerable and exposed.

“There’s nothing to protect me in this country,” Elbusefi said. “They can do whatever they want if I’m in their hands.”

Later, on March 2, tribal men — distant relatives — brought Elbusefi a rifle and extra ammo to prepare to fight for Gadhafi. He didn’t touch the gun, except for one night a few days later when there was a lot of shooting outside his apartment and he was afraid someone would come into his house.

This is not his war.

“I think I just want to go back to Kansas, and become a personal trainer, and make 20 bucks an hour or something,” Morad said. Then he backtracked, said he’d like some time to think about it, scaled down his goals a little: “The first thing I’m going to do is go to Jack Stack on (95th) and Metcalf and get a decent smoked brisket.”

Then, a verbal shrug: “I just want a normal life.”

Elbusefi worked hard to achieve one in Johnson County, though every now and then his ambitions conflicted with daily life. A former roommate, Brian, said Elbusefi got in trouble for trying to read books while driving trucks.

But once Elbusefi arrived in California, one man who knew him there said he was becoming frustrated.

“I think there’s this real disconnect in him between how smart he is — and what his vision for himself is — and what he’s been able to accomplish,” said Richard Phillips, a career counselor hired by Elbusefi for a few months in Palo Alto, Calif., who has since stayed in touch. Since the revolution, Phillips said, Elbusefi had been calling to hear a friendly voice; he said Elbusefi didn’t feel like he belonged.

“I could hear it in his voice: ‘I kind of blew it,’ ” Phillips said. “He did not ever want to go back to Libya, and he went back, and thinks, ‘OK, I’m going to try to fit in’ — and I think he found out ‘I’m American, I’m not Libyan.’ ”

But those are, to borrow a recently popular phrase, “first-world problems”; right now, before Elbusefi can start finding himself, he has to survive the wild skirmishes and the dark arts of Gadhafi’s regime and cross out of Libya.

He’s not completely defenseless. He has an American passport. And a phone. And his brother.

With a little luck, maybe he can find a safe way across. And then he can start finding himself.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/07/17/3020519/former-kc-area-resident-trapped.html#ixzz1SVLoki8B

[when it rains it pours]

if people wanna go back to these countrys with wars and political uprisings then these niggas better be ready to bust guns and die. Why go back if you know shit is unstable? bringin this shit on themselves and then calling home for help?

[TraceOneInfinite Flat Earther 96']

if people wanna go back to these countrys with wars and political uprisings then these niggas better be ready to bust guns and die. Why go back if you know shit is unstable? bringin this shit on themselves and then calling home for help?

It was stable when he went back.  And after some protests and skirmishes it was going to return to normal...   but then the United States settled on the coast and started launching bombs into the region with the help of NATO and fanning the flames of the insurgency to the point where now it's a full blown fight to the death.

[Hood Crawler]

Scary stuff man, sorry bout your friend. Hope he get back ok.

[TraceOneInfinite Flat Earther 96']

My friend made it out a couple days ago.  He was in Qadafi territory, and rode by car off road into rebel territory.  Then, once inside rebel territory he was able to go to the Tunisian border and leave with his American passport.  He had feared Qadafi's troop would stop him, arrest him, or even shoot him while fleeing from a city in which they controlled, but yet he was able to pass without being stopped at any checkpoints, and unnoticed even though he was right under their nose.   

I'll have more details later after he leaves Tunisia and comes back to US.  It's hard to get a full story when your paying like 2 dollars a minute to talk internationally

[Sami]

Good news about your friend.

Tell him to be more careful.

It has never occurred to me why someone would take a risk on going to a corrupt dictatorship *after* he already escaped from there before.

That must have been good pay they offered.