Baghdad to Billings
Mehmet Casey finds a welcoming home
Arriving in Billings for the first time on Aug. 27, 2006, Mehmet “Mo” Casey was in for a bit of a shock.
He was 24 and had never been out of his home country of Iraq. The flight out of Baghdad was his first time on an airplane. And some advice from his sister, then living in Maine, was not quite as useful as he’d hoped.
Some of his sister’s colleagues, Mehmet says, most of whom lived in Washington, D.C., advised her to tell her brother: “Pack all of his winter clothes, no need to even pack any T-shirts.” As a result, he arrived in Billings wearing a coat that went below his knees, carrying two suitcases full of winter clothes.
“The first thing I realize is, I need to go shopping,” Mehmet says. “It was incredibly hot.”
Despite that inauspicious beginning, Mehmet adapted quickly to his new surroundings.
Waiting for him at the airport that first day in Billings was Ken Briggs, then director of international programs at Rocky Mountain College, where Mehmet was to teach Arabic on a one-year Fulbright Scholarship. From the top of the Rims, Briggs had Mehmet look out over Billings, telling him that what he saw was most of the city, with another part of town, the Heights, behind them. Briggs was apprehensive that Billings would seem too small to someone from Baghdad, which then had a population of 5 million.
But Mehmet points out that Baghdad’s 5 million people were jammed into a city with a footprint only twice that of Billings. What he felt, gazing out over the city, was an unfamiliar serenity.
He told Briggs, “Ken, I didn’t think this was a possible lifestyle. I think I can hear myself think. I’ve never experienced that.”
In his early days in Billings, he took long walks to familiarize himself with his new city. It took a while to get over how pleasant everyone was, greeting him so warmly that he even wondered if everyone knew he had just come from Iraq and was trying to make him feel welcome.
“In a big city,” he says, “you don’t make eye contact with somebody unless you are either about to ask a question or you want to get in a fight.”
Nineteen years later, he’s still here, working as the development director for the Downtown Billings Association, doing his best to make the community that welcomed him into an even better place.
He was born Mohamed El Qaisi in Baghdad in 1982. After having his name somewhat mangled in the process of obtaining a passport, he changed it to Mehmet (as Mohamed is rendered in Turkish, his mother’s native tongue) L. Casey. He was quickly nicknamed “Mo” after settling in Billings.
At the time of his birth, Iraq was in the midst of a debilitating war with Iran, and Iraq was under the iron rule of Saddam Hussein, who maintained his grip on the country through a campaign of fear and terror.
His parents were high school graduates, which meant that they had the equivalent of bachelor’s degrees under the Iraqi educational system, and both of them worked in a bureau under the ministry that controlled water resources, his father as an administrative manager and his mother as an office manager.
When Mehmet’s brother and sister, 18 and 13 years his senior, respectively, were growing up, their Turkish maternal grandmother lived with them. By the time Mehmet came along, she had died and his mother left her job to raise him.
Even as a youth, Mehmet says, it was understood that you didn’t talk about politics, much less criticize Saddam or his Ba’athist Party. He said Iraqi parents learned, “through unfortunate incidents, that they had to brainwash their kids … to look up to Saddam Hussein as their secondary father. We learned from an early age to praise him.”
Still, daily life wasn’t all that bad. And though Mehmet didn’t travel outside the country, the family visited tourist destinations in Iraq, as well as an aunt’s farm in western Iraq. Several times, Mehmet’s father took him to meet semi-nomadic Bedouins who belonged to the tribe his family was traditionally aligned with.
That was another reason Mehmet liked Billings from the start. In Iraq, there were basically three places to live: rural farms and villages, Bedouin desert communities or big cities. There were no mid-size cities like Billings.
Things changed dramatically for all Iraqis after their country invaded Kuwait in 1990. The U.N. imposed crippling sanctions on Iraq, forcing it to produce all its own food, energy and medicine.
“When I came here, people were talking about recycling and reusing, repurposing,” Mehmet says. “I was, like, ‘That’s how life is. What do you mean?’ In Iraq, everything was used to death.”
Mehmet, who like many Iraqis studied English from an early age, earned a degree in English literature and linguistics at an Iraqi college. By the time he graduated in 2004, the United States and its allies had invaded Iraq, Saddam was dead and an American, Paul Bremer, was in charge of a provisional government. Mehmet wanted to work as an interpreter for American officials or the military, but his family was living in the most dangerous part of Baghdad, where anyone cooperating with the occupiers was targeted for assassination.
He worked instead as a translator in his father’s bureau, where he stayed until winning the scholarship to teach at Rocky. He had 20 students in his first Arabic class, and it was so popular he offered a second-level class the next semester, then a third-level class the following fall. The scholarship was gone by then, but Rocky took him on, though Mehmet had to work four other part-time jobs to make ends meet.
In December 2006, he started paperwork to apply for asylum, because even in the short time he had been gone, a civil war had broken out in Iraq, and competing militias were recruiting everyone from 14 to 40 with a simple message: “You either join or die.”
He stayed at Rocky until 2010, when he was hired as a tutor and teacher of English as a Second Language at Montana State University Billings, before eventually becoming an admissions and advising specialist for all international students there. While working, with an eye toward opening his own business someday, Mehmet earned a degree in public relations.
Degree in hand, he got the development director job with the DBA in 2019, the same year he became a U.S. citizen. He has never been back to Iraq and doesn’t see much reason to visit, since most of his family and friends have long since moved elsewhere themselves. His brother once sent him pictures of the old family home in Baghdad, a 1,200-square-foot residence that had been converted to four units.
At the DBA, Mehmet has become a tireless booster of the downtown. One of his key projects was collecting scattered data from all real estate agents that represent downtown commercial properties. Unlike most other areas of town, there was no one source of information for prospective tenants downtown until Mehmet came along.
“His talent for pulling up the smallest details about a person, a building, a meeting, makes him uniquely suited to the position of development director,” says Katy Schreiner, CEO of the downtown association. “He truly wants to make our community a better place.”
Katy says Mehmet has always been willing to share his culture, his Muslim faith and his experiences with others. His life, she adds, has “given him a perspective on humanity that he uses for the betterment of himself and others.”
Mehmet does admit that he misses the food he grew up eating. He’s been to most major American cities, where it is usually possible to find Iraqi food, and he still prefers Billings, but he wishes it was closer to a big city, like Denver.
“Just so that on those days when I truly miss an authentic Iraqi dish, I could go down and have it,” he says. “But I’m not going to drive eight hours just for that. So that’s the only thing I miss about being here.”
