The Guardian has a profile of Salam Pax. the Bagdhad Blogger. He'll be writing for them every other week starting Wednesday. I was expecting it because he mentioned the other day he had talked to Rory from the Guardian. The piece is worth reading. I'm surprised no journalist had found him sooner.

Rory McCarthy writes (after this excerpt, Salam responds to an earlier attack noted here on Blogcritics):

In June last year, Salam (this much of his name, at least, is real) was a recently graduated architect, aged 29, living at home with his parents and brother in Baghdad. His best friend was Raed, 25, a Palestinian-Jordanian he had met while studying architecture, who was taking a masters degree in Jordan...

As he wrote in more detail, he began to touch more often on the unspoken hardships of life in Iraq under the paranoid regime of Saddam Hussein. He could hardly have taken a greater risk if he had tried. More than 200,000 people went missing under Saddam, many for far lesser crimes than the open criticism of the regime that Salam voiced in his writings.

Like all Iraqis, Salam was familiar with the dangers. At least four of his relatives had gone missing. In the past year, for no apparent reason, one of his friends was summarily executed, shot in the head as he sat in his car, and two others were arrested; one was later freed and another, a close friend, has never returned.

Not only had Salam criticised the regime, he had written openly about the fact that he is gay. It was a frank admission in a repressive dictatorship and one that, even in the new, postwar Iraq, which at heart is still a conservative, Islamic society, represents a significant risk. And so he continues to guard his identity. "I am not going to be the first one to carry the flag. I hide behind computer screens," he says...

He wrote either in the office of the architectural firm he was representing in Baghdad, or at home, in his chaotically untidy bedroom.

Screens cover the windows to keep the midday sun away from his three computers, each of which has been opened up into a sprawling tangle of wires and circuit boards. A poster from the film The Matrix hangs on the wall, looking down on a jumble of computer books and CDs strewn over the floor. Pages of website addresses and computer commands are tacked to the wall above his screen. It was here that Salam would sit and talk endlessly about the impending war with Raed, who returned to Baghdad before the war, and the friend he describes only as G - Ghaith, another young, intelligent, eloquent architectural graduate who spent much of his adult life dodging military service...

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