Salam Pax

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Salam Pax (aka Salam al-Janabi, Arabic: سلام الجنابي‎) is a pseudonymous blogger from Iraq whose site "Where is Raed?" (see external links) received notable media attention during (and after) the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The pseudonym itself consists of the two words meaning "peace": Arabic Salām and Latin Pāx. Within his blog, Salam discusses the war, his friends, disappearances of people under the government of Saddam Hussein, and his work as a translator for journalist Peter Maass. Pax's site is titled after Pax's friend Raed Jarrar, who was working on his master's degree in Jordan: he didn't respond promptly to email, and so Pax set up the weblog for him to read. In May 2003, The Guardian newspaper tracked the man down and printed a story indicating that he did indeed live in Iraq, with the given name Salam, and was a 29-year-old architect.

First circulating the blogging community, discussion eventually reached the New York Times, with some pundits speculating that the blogger was secretly a US, Israeli, or Iraqi government agent spreading disinformation about the war. There were also claims that he was the pampered son of a senior Baath party official. Pax continued to post updates to the site after it was temporarily blocked in Iraq. During the war, he gave accounts of bombings and other attacks from his suburb of Baghdad until his Internet access (and the electrical grid) was interrupted. Pax remained offline for weeks, writing entries on paper to type later. Later entries discuss the chaotic postwar economy and a June 1, 2003 entry appears to celebrate an anarchist effort, centered in Adil, to provide free Internet access to all of Iraq. It turned out not to be run by political anarchists, but by Iraqis who ran the prewar Internet cafes in Baghdad for Uruknet, the former government ISP.

In 2003 Atlantic Books, in association with The Guardian, published a book based on "Where is Raed?" under the title The Baghdad Blog (ISBN 1-84354-262-5). The book comprises blog entries from September 2002 to June 2003 with footnotes.

In August 2004, after having not updated his previous blog for several months, Pax started a second blog titled "shut up you fat whiner!" (see external links).

He also worked as a journalist for The Guardian, writing both columns and featured articles. In October 2004 he was sent to the United States by The Guardian to report on the American presidential race and current thought there on the subject of Iraq. Since then, nothing further by him has appeared in the paper. In February 2005 a series of filmed reports by Salam Pax, produced by Guardian Films and transmitted by the BBC's Newsnight television programme won the Royal Television Society Award for Innovation.

In a Newsnight report transmitted in October 2005, he interviewed Iraqi member of parliament Adnan al-Janabi, a Sunni moderate who served as vice-chair of the constitutional committee, about the proposed Iraqi constitution and revealed that al-Janabi was his father. Salam also mentioned that his mother was Shia, and described his family as being secular in political orientation.

[edit] Quotes

  • "23/3 8:30pm (day4) we start counting the hours from the moment one of the news channels report that the B52s have left their airfield. It takes them around 6 hours to get to Iraq. On the first day of the bombing it worked precisely. Yesterday we were a bit surprised that after 6 hours bombs didn’t start falling. The attacks on Baghdad were much less than two days ago. We found out today in the news that the city of Tikrit got the hell bombed out of it. To day the B52s took off at 3pm, on half an hour we will know whether it is Baghdad tonight or another city."
  • "One day, like in Afghanistan, those journalists will get bored and go write about Syria or Iran; Iraq will be off your media radar. Out of sight, out of mind. Lucky you, you have that option. I have to live it."
  • "There were days when the Red Crescent was begging for volunteers to help in taking the bodies of dead people off the city street and bury them properly. The hospital grounds have been turned to burial grounds..."
  • "You can follow the trail of the foreigners by how much things cost in a certain district."
  • "Anyway, all that doesn’t matter now. Saddam is gone, thanks to you. Was it worth it? Be assured it was. We all know that it got to a point where we would have never been rid of Saddam without foreign intervention; I just wish it would have been a bit better planned."

[edit] External links

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