Al-Bedairy

MEMORANDUM **

Ahmed Al-Bedairy, a native and citizen of Iraq, petitions for review of the Board of Immigration Appeals’s (“BIA”) order affirming the Immigration Judge’s (“IJ”) *718 denial of his application for asylum and withholding of removal.

Where the BIA reviews the IJ’s decision de novo, our review is limited to the BIA’s decision, except to the extent that the IJ’s decision is expressly adopted. See Shah v. INS, 220 F.3d 1062, 1067 (9th Cir.2000). Accordingly, because the BIA articulated that it was affirming the IJ’s decision on the basis that the IJ “properly found on the merits” that Al-Bedairy’s testimony was not credible, we do not address the IJ’s alternative order that Al-Bedairy’s application was “pretermitted” because he was convicted of a “particularly serious crime.”

We must accept the adverse credibility finding if one of the identified grounds is supported by substantial evidence and goes to the heart of Al-Be-dairy’s claims of persecution in Iraq. See Li v. Ashcroft, 378 F.3d 959, 964 (9th Cir.2004). On this record, we conclude that the IJ’s finding that Al-Bedairy’s asylum and refugee applications do not mention the physical abuse he testified to diming…

dissenting.

I respectfully dissent. Whether or not substantial evidence supports the immigration judge’s adverse credibility finding is not determinative here. See Alvarez-Santos v. INS, 332 F.3d 1245, 1254 (9th Cir. 2003) (suggesting that an adverse credibility finding does not defeat an asylum application where additional evidence is offered to support the application). The corroborated evidence Al-Bedairy presented be *719 fore the immigration judge is as follows: because of Al-Bedairy’s father’s political activities in opposition to Saddam Hussein’s government, (1) Al-Bedairy’s father was executed; (2) Al-Bedairy and his family were imprisoned; and (3) the property of Al-Bedairy’s family was confiscated. We have granted the petitions of asylum applicants who recounted similar experiences of persecution. See Surita v. INS, 95 F.3d 814, 819 (9th Cir.1996) (holding the BIA erred in finding that petitioner did not suffer from past persecution where petitioner was threatened, robbed on multiple occasions by ethnic Fijians, and her house was looted by Fijian soldiers); Gonzalez v. INS, 82 F.3d 903, 906 (9th Cir. 1996) (granting Gallegos’s petition for review where Gallegos had been…