The hero of Baghdad

Baghdad We shall slaughter them all. God will barbecue their bellies in hell. We trap and beat them everywhere. I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad.’ The last declaration was made while a US army Abrams tank could be clearly seen blazing away across the Tigris. Welcome to the world of Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, who until Tuesday was Iraq’s minister of information. During the war, Sahaf was by far the most high-profile member of Saddam Hussein’s regime: television viewers from Tokyo to San Francisco became accustomed to him boasting how the Iraqi forces had inflicted stunning defeats on the ‘mercenary lackeys of the Zionist entity’. During his press conferences, up to four of them a day, he exhorted the international media not to listen to the ‘shameless, shameless propaganda’ coming from Washington and London, while describing a surreal, parallel war. A man of boundless energy, Sahaf would also regularly turn up at briefings given by colleagues such as Tariq Aziz and Tahir Yasin Ramadhan.