Posted 6:44 PM by Blah blah

Salam Pax Revealed (War)

Remember Salam Pax, that mysterious blogger in Baghdad who had the world reading his gripping first-hand stories of life during the war?

Well that British paper The Guardian finally tracked him down! Starting next week, Salam Pax will be writing every two weeks in The Guardian! During the war, The Guardian was my FAVORITE news source, comprehensive, independent-minded, and endlessly fascinating. If you haven't checked it out or seen all of its superbly done side sections, you're missing out!

Read the essay Cowboy Kahlil wrote about Salam. Lots of juicy quotes.

Salam's Story (The Guardian):
___________________
Salam is shy, but he has a quick and sometimes cynical humour that flows easily through his writing. Yet occasionally his wit choked on the images of death and war that appeared on the family television screen, beamed into the Hotel Pax from an illegal satellite dish on the roof. "On BBC we are watching scenes of Iraqis surrendering," he wrote on March 21, in the first week of combat. "My youngest cousin was muttering, 'What shame' to himself. Yes, it is better for them to do that, but still, seeing them carrying that white flag makes something deep inside you cringe."

By now his weblog had blossomed in confidence from idle chat to startling reportage that seems to have been driven by an underlying urge to resist the regime and to document its fall. He is almost offended when I ask later why he risked staying in Baghdad during the war, rather than escaping abroad which, as a well-off, educated Iraqi, would not have been hard. "I absolutely had to stay. This is your country, this is your place. I had to see what was going to happen."

Yet in the final weeks before the impending conflict, he became increasingly anxious that the men of the Mukhabarat, the feared Iraqi intelligence agency, were on to him. "They were not only paranoid, they were going crazy," he says. At one point the regime blocked access to the website on which he was posting his writing, blogspot.com. "There was the possibility that they knew. I spent a couple of days thinking this is the end. And then you wait for a couple of days and nothing happens and you say, 'OK, let's do it again.' Stupid risks, one after another."