Silent since March 24th, Salam Pax ("Where Is Raed?") is back online, blogging from Baghdad! He Emailed a document with all of his backdated blogs to a friend, and they were posted today.

Day by day stream of thought of the attack on Baghdad, from an articulate Iraqi civilian being forced to live through it. The whole thing is well worth reading, but here are some of the highlights:

March 24th:
The air raid sirens are not really that dependable, when they don’t sound the all clear after a whole hour of silence you get fidgety. The better alarm system is quite accidental. It has become a habit of the mosque muezzins (the prayer callers) to start chanting "allahu akbar - la illaha ila allah" the moment one of them hears an explosion. The next muezzin starts the moment he hears another calling and so on. It spreads thru the city pretty fast, and soon you have all the mosques doing the "Takbir" for five minutes or so. Very eerie but works well to alert everybody.

March 30th:
No good news anywhere, no light at the end of the tunnel and the Americans’ advance doesn’t look that reassuring. If we had a mood barometer in the house it would read "to hell with saddam and may he quickly be joined by bush". No one feels like they should welcome the American army. The American government is getting as many curses as the Iraqi.

April 1st:
There is one item which I have not thought I would need a big supply of: antacids. Air raid sirens start wailing or the heavy bombs start falling; five minutes later I go for the drawer with the antacids. Now every time the bombing starts my brother starts humming Nirvana’s "Pennyroyal Tea"

The streets are more crowded by the day and more shops are opening. Can you imagine having to stop all your work for two weeks? A huge part of the population, especially shop owners, groceries and the like all depend on a daybyday income. Two weeks is a lot of time with no money. Most manual labor is paid by the day and all these people have to sit at home because there is no work. Shop owners who live near their shops are opening; banks are open even private banks and life goes on. Things cost double their normal price but we are happy that you can still buy what you need from shops because this means we can keep what we have stored for harder days which are sure to come.

April 2nd:
Pachechi was on all the Arabic news stations with interviews and talk shows. If it is a choice between him and Chalabi. I go for Pachechi. (Elonka's Note: Search on this second name with the spelling of "Pachachi")

April 7th:
Since the day the Airport was seized we have no electricity and water is not reliable, at times if you have a tap that is higher than 50cm you won’t get water from it. . . . Right after that we saw Al-Sahaf denying once again what we have just seen minutes ago. He kept insisting that there are no American troops in ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

] Note: Salam Pax sent me this in a Word attachment
] earlier today. After weeks of silence everything's
] happening at once: yesterday I received an email
] from his cousin with his satellite phone number.
] I called it; Salam’s father decided to play grumpy
] patriarch and told me to call back in “two minutes,"
] which I did. Salam sounds fine. We discussed as many
] things as we could in a short amount of time.
] Without further ado, I present his latest posts.
] Diana Moon PS Please excuse any formatting
] weirdnesses; I've already been warned not to blog at
] work, so can't take the time to clean anything up.

Glad to see this guy is on the radar again. I've been checking "Where is Raed?" at least two or three times a day, but I wound up seeing it mentioned first on The Agonist.. Fitting, eh?

I'm likely to edit this post up after reading it over..

] Today while going thru Karada street I saw a sign
] saying “Send and receive e-mail. Affordable prices”
] I am checking out the place tomorrow. If the price
] really is affordable I might be able to update the
] blog every week or two.

With the attention this blog has gotten, a sat phone and a laptop will find its way to this guy very soon..