This past winter, Bewar Yousif made the Highland High junior varsity basketball team, the first step in his long-range plan to be the first Kurdish basketball player in the NBA.

You might be tempted to say that basketball is his life — but that wouldn't be true.

"The most important thing in my life is my family," he says of the three sisters who showed up at every j.v. game to cheer him on, the brothers who are working to support the family, his widowed mother, and a large extended family of uncles and cousins.

One day recently, when his sisters were out of town and his brothers went bowling, Bewar chose to stay home with his mom. "I worry about her," he says.

His father died when he was 5, before the family was forced to flee Iraq for Turkey, travel to a refugee camp in Guam and then eventually to their new home in Salt Lake City. It was only this past winter — the night of a basketball team dinner, which Bewar skipped to be with his family — that he finally got to see a picture of his father. That night his older brother flew back to Utah after a visit to Iraq, bringing with him photos that the family had left behind in Zakho nine years earlier.

"I wouldn't leave my family for anything," Bewar says. "If I get married I would visit every day."

As a Muslim, Bewar doesn't date. "I can talk to girls," he explains. "But it's not sexually, you know what I mean. It's not like, 'You have a nice body.' "

At school he takes U.S. history, geometry, physics and English, where soon "we're going to be reading this book 'Hamlet,' " he reports. He wants to go to college, hopefully on a sports scholarship. In addition to his dream about the NBA, he's thinking about becoming a veterinarian. Currently he has 10 parakeets and a cat.

Some day he'll visit Iraq, but his family will probably never move back, he says. "We're attracted to this place. We can accomplish something here."

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E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com