Thin Black Line
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article3685295.ece
April 5, 2008
How kidnapped Iraq security chief lived to tell the tale
With almost three million Iraqis having fled their homes Tahsin al-Sheikhly could have been just another faceless, internally displaced person. But Mr al-Sheikhly has a very public face: he is the spokesman for the Iraqi Government's security crackdown.
That status was not enough to save him from the fate of so many of his countrymen, so when the cars full of gunmen rolled up to his house in Baghdad last week, he did what so many had done before. He and his sons grabbed their guns and fought for their lives.
It was the most prominent abduction of the past year, and it has seen the face of the Iraqi security operation refusing to tell police about it for fear of revenge. As Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, launched a high-risk attack on Shia militias across the country, those same militias decided to make an example of his security spokesman.
“Around 40 people came towards my house from two directions, shooting,” Mr al-Sheikhly told The Times at the Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone, where he now lives with 17 members of his displaced family. As the government security spokesman he was supposed to have 16 guards, but only three were on duty that day. He and his sons fought alongside them in a protracted street battle. His attackers were armed with rocketpropelled grenades and heavy machineguns. The defenders shot two of their assailants as they tried to enter the gates.
But the house was on fire from the rocket fire, and full of women and children. Mr al-Sheikhly's mother, seeing the desperate situation, walked outside to beg for it to end, hoping the gunmen would respect her age. Instead, they grabbed her. “When I saw that, I put my gun down and surrendered,” said Mr al-Sheikhly, who worked in academia for 40 years before taking the job last summer as spokesman for Operation Fahd alKanoun, or Imposing the Law.
The gunmen, who openly identified themselves as al-Mahdi Army fighters, took him away to a series of safe houses. They were polite and made him as comfortable as they could, but he was convinced that they would kill him because they were all local men whom he could identify easily, yet had not bothered to hide their faces.
“They haven't any belief in anything, no national or ideological issues,” Mr al-Sheikhly said. “They are just following orders of the sheikhs, who use their ignorance to make power. People say knowledge is power, but ignorance is power for the sheikhs.”
Mr al-Sheikhly had several days to reflect on what he had lost: his house had been burnt down, destroying not only his life savings but also those of his sons, who had taken shelter with him from Baghdad's mean streets and who, like most Iraqis, do not trust banks. Most painful to Mr al-Sheikhly, though, was the loss of his lifetime collection of 6,000 books.
But in the squalid little slums where his captors kept watch over him, Mr al-Sheikhly, a well-off professor of information technology who speaks fluent English, had an epiphany into why Iraq is in such a dire condition.
“Most of the houses I saw were very, very simple and very, very poor. They haven't an ashtray. They haven't a table, a plastic one, they are drinking not clean water. If the Government doesn't take care to improve their lives, everything will be gone. “You know, our strategy [was] looking always for security, not for peace. We need social peace more than security.”
After almost five days in captivity, Mr al-Sheikhly was released when the al-Mahdi Army reached a tentative, Iranian-brokered agreement with the Iraqi Government. He was dumped on a street, and had to call a relative to pick him up. Although he knows who his kidnappers are, and despite being the spokesman for Iraq's push for law and order, he will not seek their arrest.
“Yes, I had 115 hard hours in my life, but you know, I still have my house in their neighbourhood. And I know them very well, and they know that I know them. And I have a family - I have to protect them.
“Maybe later. Now everything is confusing, there is nothing clear for us. Maybe after we settled everything we will look for them, we will impose the law. They are criminals. Of course we will follow them.” But, he added, “not for the time being”.
