The Baghdad Blog

> The Baghdad Blog Salam Pax is a pseudonym. He lives in Baghdad, Iraq. ‘“Salam Pax” is an extremely talented writer. The singularity of his position and subject matter can lead one to overlook this, but I was aware of it as soon as I started reading him, just prior to the war. The fact that English is not his first language actually underscores his gifts of observation and expression; he’ll write “around” his own uncertainty of usage, and get it right on the button.’ William Gibson ‘The most vivid account of the Iraq conflict’ Guardian ‘Salam Pax not only highlighted the deficiencies of embedded media, [his] blog became required reading for anyone needing to find out what was really happening on the ground during the US-led invasion.’ Globe and Mail ‘The reliable chronicler of the chaos’ Spiegel ‘A mysterious Iraqi who goes by the name of “Salam Pax” and who writes a blog (internet diary) from Baghdad is becoming a celebrity, on the internet, with his first-hand stories of a city under siege . the traffic on the site has become so intense that it has blocked the server, while his e-mail has gone on the blink due to the vast number of messages from people who are asking him to prove his true identity.’ La Stampa ‘Salam Pax, the anonymous Iraqi blogger who went worryingly silent during the US invasion, is back. And he makes up by clearing the backlog . His account of Baghdad since the liberation is fascinating. It is far better than anything you’ll read in the newspapers. Things you wouldn’t have known: Thuraya satphones are the ultimate Baghdad status symbol; there’s utter contempt for the exiles who’ve appropriated the best real estate (Chalabi’s group took over Salam’s sports club); locals would shoo out the Syrian Fedayeen creeps for fear they’d attract American retaliation; and Salam likes the communists, who are at least honest. It’s great stuff.’ Nick Denton > TheBaghdad Blog Salam Pax Atlantic Books London First published in 2003 by Atlantic Books, on behalf of Guardian Newspapers Ltd. Atlantic Books is an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd. Copyright © Salam Pax 2003 Introduction copyright © Ian Katz 2003 The moral right of Salam Pax to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. The Guardian is a registered trademark of the Guardian Media Group Plc. Guardian Books is an imprint of Guardian Newspapers Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The author and publishers would like to thank all the bloggers who have contributed to this book. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 1 84354 262 5 Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Ltd Design by Richard Marston Map of Pre-war Baghdad, p.ii, by Finbarr Sheehy Grove Atlantic Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do. Samuel P. Huntington Contents Introduction Ian Katz ix 2002 September 1 October 9 November 28 December 46 2003 January 68 February 86 March 105 April 141 May 158 June 187 Acknowledgements and Blogroll 205 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I came relatively late to ‘Where is Raed?’, the enigmatically named web-site on which most of the material in this book first appeared. A week or so before the bombs began falling (I mean the last lot, as Salam might say), a colleague had e-mailed me about a remark- able web diary apparently being written by a savvy young Iraqi man somewhere in suburban Baghdad. By then Salam Pax was a firm favourite with the international community of bloggers – the swelling band of electronic motor mouths whose self-published dia- tribes, musings and banalities have become the Internet’s most compelling new phenomenon. His own weblog was being linked to by more sites than any other and the web bristled with debate about his true identity. Within a minute or two of entering the Baghdad Blogger’s quirky, acutely observed world, I could see why. Salam’s diary was quite simply the freshest, most exciting writing coming out of Iraq. Two things about it were instantly striking. The first was its almost giddy irreverence about Saddam’s regime. Whereas foreign journalists needed the Baathist equivalent of a PhD in kremlinology to parse the ritualistic declarations of fealty by ordinary Iraqis for any indication of dissent, Salam treated his rulers with (very) thinly veiled contempt. The second was that he was just like us. By now we had got used to a portrayal of Iraqis as poor, anti-Western, frequently hysterical and altogether very different from us; here was one who addressed us in perfect idiomatic English, was obsessed with David Bowie lyrics and awaited the release of the new Massive Attack album as eagerly as any Glastonbury regular. One of my favourite entries in Introduction ------------ | dear_raed.blogspot.com. ix x the blog described a defiant visit to a Baghdad music store days | before the start of the war, after which he reported with some satis- faction that The Deftones and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club had ‘joined the Pax Radio CD racks’. Another ingredient added to the diary’s powerful, subversive Introduction appeal: it was, heaven forfend, very funny. Salam appeared to delight in recording in actuarial detail the blackest absurdities of his – and his country’s – predicament. On 11 February he broke from a reflection on George Bush’s style of diplomacy to report that DJs on Baghdad’s English-language radio station were not allowed to refer to the band Bush by name. ‘They have to spell it: “Bee yu ess etch have yet another single out.” I bet all the DJs there thank God there isn’t a band called Schwartzkopf.’ A few weeks later, he was ruthlessly lampooning a BBC reporter for referring to Iraqis maintaining an air of normality. ‘Look, what are you supposed to do? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee!’ He ended that entry with a list of ‘other normal stuff we did this week’. It included taping up his home windows, installing a manual water pump and buying face-masks. Under the circumstances it wasn’t surprising that some people thought the Baghdad Blogger was too good to be true. Salam’s appetite for verbal tricksiness – his pseudonym is a play on the word ‘peace’ in Arabic and Latin, while the address of the site con- tains the palindrome ‘dearraed’ – only fuelled the speculation. Wonderfully, the conviction of those who believed that he was a Baathist agent was matched only by the suspicion of others that he was a Mossad or CIA operative. Some web commentators conduct- ed elaborate technical checks on his e-mails to establish where he was posting from; others cited their own contacts with him as evidence of his bona fides. I was never in any doubt: Salam’s diaries were simply too detailed, too accurate and too insightful – they smelled of the place – to be anything other than the real thing. Salam had begun his blog six months earlier as a way of keeping in touch with his friend, Raed, who had moved to study in Jordan. Now he seemed genuinely nonplussed by the fuss it was creating. When I e-mailed him asking permission to run extracts from it in the Guardian he replied: ‘*shrug* It is getting out of control and blown beyond what it is and getting far too much attention. Do what you like. But everybody is making a huge deal out of it.’ On 24 March, two days after the onslaught on Baghdad began, we published an electrifying extract describing the build-up to war in the Iraqi capital. It ended: ‘6.05 p.m. Two more hours until the B52s get to Iraq.’ For four days, Salam did not update his site – and then, on 25 March, a terse account of the first few days of the conflict appeared. The usual brio was conspicuously absent. ‘People (and I bet “allied forces”) were expecting things to be much easier,’ he wrote. ‘There are no waving masses of people welcoming the Americans, nor are they surrendering by the thousands. People are doing what all of us are: sitting in their homes hoping that a bomb doesn’t fall on them and keeping their doors shut.’ Agonisingly, he did not post again for the duration of the conflict. The e-mails I sent every few days went unanswered. I wrote to Diana Moon, the wonderful New York blogger who had become Salam’s closest net friend and asked her to forward my messages. Still nothing. We hoped for the best (that he had lost access to the Internet) and feared the worst (discovery by Saddam’s Mukhabarat? A wayward coalition bomb?). Then on 7 May, a month after Saddam’s statue was wrenched from its pedestal in Al-Firdaws Square, the e-mail grapevine began to buzz: Salam had posted again, with a little help from Diana Moon.

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