We’re Back, and So is Farris Hassan
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 01.02.06 | 12:44 PM ET
Welcome back, Farris. The 16-year-old high school student, who had taken $1,800 his parents gave him to invest in the stock market and embarked on a solo trip to Iraq, returned home to Fort Lauderdale, Florida last night. It ended one of the most fascinating odysseys of 2005. Hassan took off for the Middle East on December 11, reportedly to research a school journalism project.
After bouncing from Kuwait to Lebanon, he flew into Baghdad on Christmas Day. His trip became front-page news around the world. Reporters were fascinated. His parents weren’t. “We are going to watch his every move,” his mother Shatha Atiya told CBS. “We are going to take his passport. We’re going to limit his access to money.” Predictably, pundits have turned Hassan’s experience into a political weapon. Stephen Elliott writes on Huffington Post: “The story of Farris Hassan seems to prove only one thing and that is we have turned Iraq into the least American-friendly place in the world.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
