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Ahmad and his oldest daughter Sana'a at her house in Mosul. In her arms is Ahmad's youngest grandchild and namesake, Ahmad. (Photo: M. Goldfarb)

In the end, the Green Berets and Peshmerga never took the Khazer Bridge. The Iraqi army tried to blow it up, but the charge didn't destroy the span, just collapsed part of it. The bridge was quickly shored up, and one lane was opened. A massive traffic jam built around it as people from Erbil thronged towards Mosul.

Some, like Ahmad were going home. However, it turned out that most were going to loot.

We fought our way through the traffic jam, pushed our way through checkpoints. A column of dust rising from the road, a radio tower and smoke on the horizon, and we were in the outskirts of Mosul.

The roadside was a surreal carnival. A blizzard of paper had settled along it, mile after mile, as if every file in every Mosul office had been thrown into the sky and settled into paper drifts. There were minutes of Ba'ath party meetings, purchase orders from government agencies, even elementary school records: the bureaucratic detritus of a hideous dictatorship. People were flowing in and out of ransacked government food stores and supply depots. Flatbed trucks, many driven by Kurds from the Erbil region were piled high with unlikely combinations of goods: blankets, bedding, and three pronged ceiling fans. One boy of around 12 was pushing a giant tractor tire twice as tall as himself down the side of the road.\

Looted goods returned to a mosque in Mosul. (Photo: M. Goldfarb)

The scenes of looting did not dampen the mood inside the car. Ahmad and his son Sindibad were in a state of frenzied glee. We drove into a residential neighborhood and pulled up in front of the home of Ahmad's mother-in-law, Sindibad's grandmother. The woman grabbed hold of her grown-up grandson as if she was pulling him from the raging waters of a flood.

Next stop was at Ahmad's oldest daughter, Sanaa's, home. There were ululations of joy instead of tears here. After drinking tea Ahmad wanted to give me a tour of his city. For three weeks he'd been promising this tour culminating in a fish lunch on the banks of the Tigris. That wasn't going to happen this day. The restaurants were closed and all economic activity had ceased -- except for looting. As we crossed the Tigris River and drove into Mosul's picturesque Old City the scale of the rioting began to dampen the mood. By the time we reached Diwassi Square, near the central bank, the heart of the city, the sense of danger was equal to anything we experienced with the Green Berets on the battlefield.

There were no police. There were no American soldiers. There was simply no recognized authority. As men looted the central bank for what was already worthless money, Peshmerga were firing at them to get them to leave. The men, mostly Arabs, were ignoring the Kurds. Some were firing back.

Ahmad stands outside the ruins of the "Security Management" building in Mosul. He was tortured here in 1996-7. The building was hammered by a B-52 strike. (Photo: M. Goldfarb)

While the firing went on, Ahmad had already got into a political argument with some onlookers. The subject was democracy. It was getting dangerous hanging around the bank so we drove back over the Tigris to return to Ahmad's daughter's house.

Suddenly he shouted at our driver to stop.

We were by a big three-story high building that had been semi-pancaked by a B-52 strike. We jumped out of the car and spent a few minutes looking at the smoldering ruin. This was the building where Ahmad had been tortured in 1997. The smoke drifted out of the building toward us. "It's the best perfume I've ever smelled," he laughed, then added quietly, "Thanks America."

And so the day went: elation at returning to his hometown, despair at the wanton destruction of that same town, elation again at seeing this terrible symbol of the regime ruined.

Kurdistan is yet another magnificent country where you can't walk just anywhere. The place is honeycombed with minefields. (Photo: M. Goldfarb)

We returned to his daughter's house. I asked Ahmad what he had been arguing with the guys down at the bank about. "I try to make them understand the real meaning of democracy. It does not mean you just say what you want. It means you have to fight against dictatorism. You fight for human rights. They do not understand these things."

We had planned to stay in Mosul, and brought overnight bags. But there was no electricity, food was in sparse supply, the city was lawless and there was just a general sadness of mood, so we returned to Erbil. We revisited Mosul the next day, but it was even more dangerous. Throughout the war, there was never a battle for Mosul. In the first week after the regime collapsed, between 30 and 50 people were killed.

For weeks Ahmad planned to move from Erbil back to Mosul as soon as the war was over. Now the war had ended and instead all his Mosul family moved to his home in Erbil. The last time I visited with him, there were 18 people living in the little house.

When we spoke on the roof of his daughter's home Ahmad Shawkat seemed pretty determined to play a part in rebuilding his country, although, he confided to me, it will be more difficult than he originally thought. "I hope I will be able to do something," he said.

The something that Ahmad chose to do was start a weekly newspaper, which gave him a platform to write about democracy and free speech. He called it "Without Direction," alluding to fact that he took no orders from anyone on what to publish. He constantly criticized Islamic terrorists. In return he received repeated death threats from radical Islamists. On October 28, 2003, while making a phone call on the roof of his office building, my guide to the heart of Iraq, Ahmad Shawkat was murdered.

-Michael Goldfarb

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