By Barb Arland-Fye The Catholic Messenger Widad Akreyi was 8 years old, attending an all-girls school in northern Iraq, when a member of the ruling Ba’ath Party entered her classroom. He wanted all of the students to join the Ba’ath Party. She refused. “I said I didn’t want to join their party.” The shocked man instructed someone to write down her name. She will join the party, he said. But Widad again refused. “He became really, really angry. He used force against me,” Widad told a small group of students and professors at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill.