Farris Hassan's Big Adventure

A 16-year-old from Florida who travelled to Iraq on his own without telling his parents was put on a flight home yesterday.
Farris Hassan, of Fort Lauderdale, had been under the care of the US Embassy after being on his own in Iraq for several days.
"I'm going to hug him. He's my little angel," his mother, Shatha Atiya, said.
Farris, a junior at Pine Crest School, is studying "immersion journalism" – those writers who live the lives of their subjects in order to better understand it.
The teenager, whose parents were born in Iraq but have lived in the US for about 35 years, said he wanted to travel to Baghdad to better understand what Iraqis are living through.
"I thought I'd go the extra mile for that, or rather, a few thousand miles," he said before leaving for home.
Farris flew to Kuwait, where a taxi dropped him in the desert at the Iraq border, but he could not cross because of tightened security ahead of the Iraqi parliamentary elections.
So he flew to Beirut, Lebanon, to stay with family friends and then flew from there to Baghdad.
After two days, he ran into reporters and told them he was doing research for a school project. Alarmed he was on his own, they alerted US Embassy officials, who sent a detachment of soldiers to pick him up.
"I wanted to experience during my Christmas the same hardships ordinary Iraqis experience every day, so that I may better empathise with their distress," Farris said.