Ex-PoW finds safety back inside barbed wire

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http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030826/USOLDN/International/Idx

Less than a month after gaining his freedom from a prisoner-of-war camp, Fadi Wasi was back at the camp entrance. He wanted to be a U.S. prisoner again -- this time for his own protection.

The tale of the 18-year-old former Iraqi soldier, fleeing loyalists of deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein who dominate his hometown, is a story of the climate of fear that still prevails in Iraq. It also helps explain why the U.S. military and its allies in Iraq are having such difficulty in pacifying the land.

The slim teenager was a conscript soldier, ordered to fight against the U.S.-led invasion in the spring. He rebelled against the Iraqi army, stabbed a Hussein loyalist, threw away his rifle and deserted. Just after the invasion of Iraq, he surrendered to a Globe and Mail reporter in the port city of Umm Qasr, denouncing the regime that had press-ganged him into the army.

But when he was released from the PoW camp in May and returned to his hometown, he was kicked out of his home by his father, a supporter of the Baath Party that had ruled Iraq for decades. The town is in the so-called Sunni Triangle, north of Baghdad, a stronghold of Baathists and fedayeen -- paramilitary fighters.

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