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."...

His father heard the reports and for the first time guessed that that it was his son they were referring to. "When he heard this, he was sure that something bad would happen." By now 20,000 people were regularly reading Salam's words and his writing became the most linked-to diary on the internet.

Then suddenly, around 10 days into the war, the ever paranoid Iraqis closed down all internet access...

Salam also responds today to that columnist (or at least email generated by the column) who wrote that his parents were members of the Ba'ath party and his father was an Iraqi oil minister:

I really need to get something out of my system.

I got an email. After throwing everything and the kitchen sink at me they ask:

"How are your parents doing?
Ah yes, your parents. Salam, people are wondering."

Actually they are doing very well, thank you. My father was invited to an informal dinner attended by Garner the second week he was in Baghdad; he also met some of Bodine’s aides and has met some of Bremer’s aides a couple of times too. Not to mention many of your top military people south of Baghdad.

Seriously, not joking there.

Let me make a suggestion. Do not assume, not even for a second, that because you read the blog you know who I am or who my parents are. And you are definitely not entitled to be disrespectful. Not everything that goes on in this house ends up on the blog, so please go play Agatha Christy somewhere else.

page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4