The Good News from Baghdad.....

SALAM PAX is alive and well... and is back on the internet two days ago (07 May 2003) weblogging again from Baghdad

Many feared he was dead due to his sudden silence from 24 March 2003 when bombs were falling in Baghdad.

His weblog address is ---> http://dear_raed.blogspot.com

Here's a background of the "Baghdad blogger" who called himself SALAM PAX in his weblog during the early days of the Iraq war by Alex Massie, writing in news.scots.com

AFTER weeks of silence and rumours he might be dead, the "Baghdad blogger" reappeared on the internet yesterday with new e-mails about life in Iraq. Writing under the pen name of Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger’s e-mails chronicling life outside his Baghdad window became required reading for more than a million people in the run-up to the war.

But for six weeks, when US bombers targeted Iraq’s communications infrastructure, access to the internet was impossible and his website (www.dear_raed.blogspot.com) went quiet.

Yesterday he returned with fresh pieces presenting a compelling and vivid picture of life in Baghdad during the war and in the days and weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Salam Pax, a pseudonym that plays on the Arabic and Latin words for peace, gained a cult following before the war as increasing numbers of internet readers turned to him for a fresh and revealing perspective of life in Baghdad.

His site regularly featured in lists of the ten most popular weblogs, although some members of the so-called "blogosphere" questioned his authenticity, speculating he might be an intelligence agent for the CIA or even Israel’s Mossad.

However, investigations established that Salam Pax was using the Iraqi internet server Uruklink. He is believed to be a gay Iraqi architect, 29, who was educated partly in Austria. His real name is still not known.

The latest entries to his on-line journal, the first since 24 March, were posted by Diane Moon, a blogger from New York City who has befriended Salam Pax.

She writes: "After weeks of silence everything’s happening at once: yesterday I received an e-mail 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."