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Return of the Baghdad Blogger

• Salam Pax
• 17 Jun 08, 12:41 PM

Hello. This is the Baghdad Blogger. It's been a while since the last blog online and on television so I'll try and not be too sad if you've forgotten about me and moved on to more interesting blogs and bloggers.

About a year ago my family decided to leave Iraq. I was coming to the UK for a year to study and most of my extended family had already left Iraq as the levels of violence on the streets rose and we all felt frustrated by the lack of any improvement.

It wasn't an easy decision to make. We as a family stayed in Iraq and witnessed the death of friends and relatives; sat at home through days of waiting for good news from kidnapped acquaintances and clung to every little change on the political landscape in hope that this will be the moment things will change to the better.

We left our home as my neighbourhood somehow became a Sunni enclave and became less safe for my mother. And helped my aunts and uncles do the same.

There was a moment when most of the things I loved about Baghdad became a memory as I sat in our new home.

My father's brief involvement in politics meant that we had to live within a protected area and his fear for us meant that if we were to go out on the street we would have to be escorted.

I put my camera aside, my mother stopped visiting her siblings or going to the shops.

One morning we were woken up by one of the guards assigned to protect my father and told that American soldiers are at the door, they want to search our house.

They suspect we were hiding explosives. As we stood outside while the house was searched we were told that the neighbours had told the nearby American check point that they should check us out.

It was a Shia area, my father's Sunni tribe made them suspicious. The American soldiers left after finding nothing. And for us it was clearly time to move out.

This is when we, like almost two million Iraqis, decided it was safer for to leave for a while. Most of us who have left Iraq looked for refuge in neighbouring countries.

Like my own family most Iraqis are in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates - my own is spread throughout three of those four, as not all of us were able to get some sort of legal residence in the same country. And a much smaller percentage made it to shores farther away including the UK.

In the next couple of days I will be trying to find out more about the situation of Iraqi asylum seekers in the UK and will be making a film about their situation here to be shown on Newsnight in July.

I will be finding out what is happening to Iraqis whose application for refugee status here has been refused and also talking to Caroline Slocock from about what appears to be the Home Office's decision to accelerate forced deportations of failed asylum seekers.

I will keep you posted.

Salam's report will be broadcast on Newsnight in late June.