The Martyrdom of Ahmad Shawkat

Ahmad Shawkat was an Iraqi Kurd who edited his own radical magazine--Bilattijah--during the last years of Saddam Hussein’s rule and wrote enthusiastically about Iraq’s future as a state free from tyranny, secular and religious, for which he was imprisoned and tortured on four different occasions.

When Michael Goldfarb went to Iraq the cover the Second Gulf War for the US’s National Public Radio in 2003, Shawkat became his translator, guide and close friend, and they planned to stay in close contact after Saddam was toppled and Goldfarb returned home.

Their plans did not work out. Shortly after the USA military had declared victory, Shawkat was shot to death outside his office in Mosul by one of the Islamic terror groups he had railed about. The identity of his killers has never been established but Goldfarb swore to memorialise his life in a book, first published in 2005, now republished under a new title to mark the 21st anniversary of the war.

Michael Goldfarb is an award-winning author, documentarian and podcaster. A native New Yorker, he moved to London in 1985 and spent many years covering conflicts and attempts at conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Iraq for NPR (National Public Radio) in the USA.

Since 1993, the BBC has sent him back to America periodically to report on social and cultural changes in his homeland subsequent to his relocation. More recently he has been charting the rise, fall and persis- tence of Donald Trump in a series of radio documentaries for the BBC; on his FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast (goldfarbpod.com); and at his substack, History of a Calamity (michaelgoldfarb.substack. com).

His journalism has won the highest honours on both sides of the Atlantic including the DuPont-Columbia Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Lowell Thomas Award in America and the Sony Gold award in Britain. He has also been a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.＂

His life as a reporter has led to his writing books. The book on which the present volume is based--Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq--followed his experiences as an unembedded reporter in Kurdistan during the first phase of Gulf War II, between March and April 2003. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.