Where is mohammed saïd al sahaf

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Sporting a kicky black beret and delightfully bombastic lexicon, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf appeared on TV daily to predict American failure and deny the Baghdad invasion--sometimes even as U. Bush said of Sahaf, admitting that he occasionally interrupted meetings to watch Sahaf's briefings.

He was a classic. Sahaf became the subject of T-shirts, mugs, adoring websites, a pop song, and an action figure. Besides adding levity to news cycles otherwise filled with fuzzy green explosions, Sahaf represented everything that made Iraq's invasion seem not quite like a real war. Wars are serious, and this guy was adorable. Even if you opposed the Iraq invasion, you had to admit it's hard to respect a government whose official mouthpiece told a reporter, "Shock and awe?

It seems that we are the awe on them. They are suffering from the shock and awe, okay? Sahaf stuck to his post--and his story--until the day before Baghdad fell. Then he surrendered to American forces, was interrogated and promptly released, suggesting a lowly spot on the Ba'ath party totem pole.

He surfaced in Abu Dhabi in July of , gave a couple of interviews, and settled into obscurity. But in retrospect, the opposite seems truer. Sahaf had bad information, sure, but several of his more ludicrous predictions have since come true--some in the ways he meant, and, more chillingly, some in ways no one else could have foreseen.

Sahaf's nickname, "Baghdad Bob," now denotes someone who confidently declares what everyone else can see is false--someone so wrong, it's funny. But when read beside the eventual cost of America's decade in Iraq, "Baghdad Bob" isn't so funny anymore. Nor did Iraq have 18 mobile laboratories for making anthrax and botulism, as Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed before the United Nations in February , nor had Saddam Hussein recently tried to buy large quantities of uranium from Africa, as President Bush asserted in his State of the Union address.

A decade of war was based on things that had never taken place. Special Reports. What's on. Business Traveller. Global Office. Principal Voices. Music Room. Talk Asia. Sahaf: Scorned by western media but a hero to some Arabs Story Tools. Story Tools. Iran poll to go to run-off. EU 'crisis' after summit failure. CNN US. Ad info.