Who is salam pax

In writing this web diary, Salam took a huge risk. Had he been caught criticizing Saddam on his web site, it would have cost him his life. Salam Pax's incisive and dryly funny articles soon attracted a massive worldwide readership. In the months that followed, as an American-led force gathered to destroy the Iraqi regime, his diary became a unique record of the resentment, amusement and terror felt by an ordinary man living through the final days of a long dictatorship, and the chaos that followed its destruction.

This book collects together Salam Pax's writings to tell the story of the war in Iraq from inside that besieged country. It provides a gripping perspective on the conflict and its aftermath.

Add to Cart. They blocked certain search terms and they did actually have a bunch of people looking at URL requests going through their servers. It sounds absurd but believe me, they did that. I had a friend who worked at the ISP and he would tell me about the latest trouble in the Mukhabarat [secret police] room. Sometimes when Mr Site Killer would get very upset by people Googling Saddam or his sons, Google would be blocked, and it would take the people at the service provider days to convince him that it is not Google which is the baddie, that it has nothing to do with the content people are searching.

We also had no access to sites offering free web mail or web space. You had to use the mail account provided by the ISP and you can bet your wireless mouse this mail was being monitored. But the beauty of the internet is that it is not static, it changes all the time. There are always new sites offering all sorts of services and the people who run the firewall were not always that clued-up. They were just as new to this as we were and it was a race.

We would use a certain web mail service until the site was blocked, then start a new search. You had to be creative with your search terms and have lots of patience. And for those who were a little bit geekier, the internet offered a wealth of tunnelling software to download, little programs which allowed you to make tiny holes in the firewall through which you could access blocked sites.

They knew it was happening. It was a cat and mouse game. It was on one of these searches that I found blogs. With blogs the web started talking to me in a much more personal way. Bits of news started having texture and most amazingly, these blogs talked with each other.

That hyperlink to the next blog - I just couldn't stop clicking. And the best thing about it was that Mr Site Killer had absolutely no clue. To tell you the truth, sharing with the world wasn't really that high on my top five reasons to start a blog.

It was more about sharing with Raed, my Jordanian friend who went to Amman after we finished architecture school in Baghdad. He is a lousy email writer; you just don't expect any answers from him. He will answer the next time you see him. So instead of writing emails and then having to dig them up later it would all be there on the blog. So Where is Raed? I never worried about the people monitoring the web finding out, it was just silly stuff.

The first reckless thing I did was to put the blog address in a blog indexing site under Iraq. I did this after I spent a couple of days searching for Arabs blogging and finding mostly religious blogs. I thought the Arab world deserved a fair representation in the blogsphere, and decided that I would be the profane pervert Arab blogger just in case someone was looking.

Putting my site at that portal eatonweb was the beginning of the changing of my blog's nature. I got linked by the Legendary Monkey and then Instapundit - a blog that can drive a stampede of traffic to your site. I saw my site counter jump from the usual 20 hits a day to 3,, all coming from Instapundit - we call it experiencing an Insta-lanche from avalanche and if I remember correctly it was a post I wrote on October 12 in which I called the American plan to invade Iraq just a colonialist plot.

I just flicked the rant switch on, wrote for half an hour and was surprised that the world took notice. What really worried me was the people writing those emails were doing so as if I was a spokesman for the Iraqi people.

There are 25 million Iraqis and I am just one. With the attention came the fear that someone in Iraq might actually read the blog, since by now it had entered warblog territory. But Mr Site Killer still didn't block it. 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. Reports of his writing began to filter into the newspapers in Britain and the US.

At one point during the war, while he was still able to access the internet and send his writing, the Arabic radio services of the BBC and the Voice of America ran stories on him. His father heard the reports and for the first time guessed that it was his son they were referring to. Then suddenly, about 10 days into the war, the ever paranoid Iraqis closed down all internet access.

Unable to post his diaries, Salam continued to write: "After eight months, it became a habit. Mostly he wrote in a notebook, describing the bombings across Baghdad and the increasingly frenetic Iraqi army and fedayeen.

Three weeks ago he collected his writings together and sent them by email to Diana Moon, a trusted fellow blogger from New York, who posted them on the site. Salam is modest about what he has written, but furious, too, with those who doubted his authenticity. At one point he changed the name of the weblog to simply Dear Raed. Many thought the palindrome hinted that Salam Pax didn't exist, but was an agent of Iraqi or US intelligence.

He was reluctant to cheer the US invasion in his writings but, like most Iraqis, says only a foreign invasion could have overthrown Saddam and so accomplished what most of the population longed for. But, again like most, he is bitter about the looting and lawlessness which for the past six weeks have gripped Baghdad. There is no way they could wash their hands clean of it," he says. The diary of Salam Pax. Please try again later. The Sydney Morning Herald. June 14, — Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later.