Overseas Feature
United States; Iraq question Munir
By Nicholas M. Horrock
BAGHDAD (UPI) Munir Faiz Mohammad
has the distinction, though he wouldn't call it that, of being
investigated by US authorities after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks and jailed by Saddam Hussein's secret police. In a sense
he is a story of stereotypes.
Munir is a pilot. He was born in Baghdad 44 years ago to a wealthy
family and from childhood he wanted to fly. His father sent him
to Oxford air training in England. And 20 years later he was flying
Boeing 737s. He has flown for Iraqi Airlines, Union Texas Oil
Co. and Lasmop Petroleum in Pakistan.
During the course of his career he divorced his wife in Baghdad and met and married an American girl from Kalamazoo, Mich., and this brought him on Sept. 11 to be flying in Albany, N.Y.
After the attacks in New York and Washington, the FBI came calling. "Can you blame them? I am an Iraqi with a 737 license," he said. In the months that followed, the FBI cleared him, but he lost his job as a pilot and found himself clerking in a Kalamazoo chain store. And facing major financial problems, he decided to return to Baghdad on July 26, 2002.
He became a driver and translator for a team of doctors from Doctors Without Borders. The physicians from France, Austria and Sweden were in Baghdad helping local hospitals cope with the limitations of local medical care.
As did every foreign group, they had government minders who tracked their every move for Saddam's secret police. Then war came and for 10 days the bombing limited the doctors' activities. Then mysteriously and irrationally, Munir and two of the foreign doctors "disappeared," the local term for being arrested by the secret police.
The doctors have agreed not to tell their
story for several weeks, but Munir told United Press International
what happened.
"As the bombing continued they were panicking. They kept
asking me who was the head of my spying group? When I couldn't
answer, since there was no spying group, they would tell me my
head would be cut off," he said.
The next 10 days was a tour of Baghdad's most notorious jails ending up in Faluja, where 230 people were held with one toilet and one water tap. He told UPI he didn't see any American prisoners, but there were Sudanese, Swedish and Japanese business people in jail with him. He called his captors "the worst of the worst, who are specialists in torture and assassination."
He said the prisoners told him of a red room in one jail, where the doors, windows, everything was painted bright red, and prisoners often lost their minds.
Suddenly on Friday, the secret police disappeared, the prison was abandoned and Munir walked free.