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.