To the soldiers of the 416th Civil Affairs Battalion - among them a Philadelphia Municipal Court judge and an assistant district attorney in the city - he was a marvel.
"That kid had a lot of guts," said Patrick Dugan, the judge. "Safa would keep coming back."
When a car bomb nearly killed him, Ismael knew he had to leave Iraq for good.
So he wound up in Philadelphia, through the efforts of Dugan and other soldiers with clout, including Bryan Lentz, a former assistant district attorney, and Jeffrey Voice, an Army lieutenant colonel from Northeast Philadelphia.
Ismael became the first person granted asylum in the United States under a revised law allowing for resettlement of Iraqi and Afghan interpreters.
"It's something that we owed him," said Dugan, then a sergeant. "He protected us. He kept us alive. The least we could do was get him here and give him a fresh start."
Only now, five years later and working in the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, does Ismael, 30, feel safe enough to speak publicly.
He worries about his mother and eight siblings. A visit home is risky.
"I'm sure terrorists will bring back their lists and say, 'This hasn't been checked off yet,' " Ismael said. "I don't want to bring trouble to my already troubled family."
But Ismael has a family here as well.
"If you could've seen the joy of the people who were meeting him at the airport, the tears," Dugan said. "It felt so good to see him here safe."
When he landed in November 2005, Ismael, his forehead cut from the car bombing only weeks before, was stunned at the sight of seven men with whom he had served.
"I didn't expect at any point in my life that I would see them all together . . . waiting for me," Ismael said.
