Faisal Saeed Al Mutar ( Arabic : فيصل سعيد المطر ; born 1991) is an Iraqi-American human-rights activist, writer, and satirist who was admitted to the United States as a refugee in 2013. He is founder of Global Conversations and Ideas Beyond Borders and formerly worked for Movements.org to assist dissidents in closed societies worldwide. [2] He became an American citizen in June 2019.
Faisal Saeed Al Mutar was born in Hillah , Iraq , in 1991. [3] He later moved to Baghdad . Al Mutar grew up in a religiously moderate Muslim family in Iraq, though he remained nonreligious throughout his upbringing. [4] He described growing up under Saddam as being exposed to the "motherlode of misinformation". [5]
Al Mutar's writings and secular lifestyle made him a target for threats and attacks by al-Qaeda. He survived three attempted kidnappings. [6] His brother and cousin were also killed by al-Qaeda in sectarian violence there. [7] Al Mutar visited Lebanon and then Malaysia where he founded the Global Secular Humanist Movement in September 2010 "with the mission of addressing the absence of recognition and legal protections for secular humanists." As a result of his activism, Al Mutar received death threats from