May Witwit is an Iraqi who is now living in the UK. She was forced to flee Baghdad when her life became too dangerous – leaving her job as a university lecturer in literature behind her. She has recently published a book about how she managed to escape Iraq with the help of a gutsy BBC journalist.
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Nabeel Yasin is one of Iraq’s most famous poets. His poems had him branded an enemy of the state under Saddam Hussein. He left Iraq for England 30 years ago with his wife and young son and continued to write and publish poetry from exile. Now he’s returned to his country and ran for prime minister in this month’s elections. ‘In our legacy here in Iraq we have some ideas about the conscience and duty of the state,’ he says. ‘Which should be to give happiness to the citizens, as numerous religious leaders have told us. For me there can be no kind of enlightenment without civil society.’
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Author Stephen Armstrong describes the real men who become mercenaries - the British nightclub bouncer who turned up in Iraq, picked up an AK47 and got himself some private security work. 'You have to remember that there are blokes who were trained as soldiers, then the army said, ‘You’ve served your time, out you go,’ and they are doing the best they can. And can you blame them?' Most of these people, he says, are not bloodthirsty mercenaries, they are just trying to get by using the skills they have.
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Colin Freeman is The Sunday Telegraph’s chief foreign correspondent. In August 2004 he was shot and assaulted by militia loyal to radical Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr in the city of Basra. In 2008, researching a story about piracy in Somalia, he was kidnapped by his own bodyguards. He and a Spanish photographer spent six weeks in a cave before being released unharmed. In 2005, following his return from Iraq, Freeman wrote The Curse of the Al Dulaimi Hotel: and Other Half-Truths from Baghdad.
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Jacob Weisberg is a political journalist, editor-in-chief of Slate Group, a division of The Washington Post Company, and a columnist for the Financial Times. The creator and author of the Bushisms series, Weisberg published The Bush Tragedy in 2008. Weisberg says that Bush suffers from serious immaturity, often cutting people down with name-calling. He compares George W to Shakespeare’s Prince Hal.
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Yosri Fouda was chief investigative reporter for Al Jazeera Arabic for many years. He remains the only person to have interviewed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, masterminds of the 9/11 attacks. He is the co-author of Masterminds of Terror: The Truth Behind the Most Devastating Attack The World Has Ever Seen. As Al Jazeera’s London Bureau Chief, Fouda broke the story on the “martyrdom video” by 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Ziad Jarrah. He is now based in Cairo and presents Last Word on ONTV. Fouda says the 9/11 Commission Report is a disgrace.
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