Sheikh Taj Eldin Al Hilaly went to Iraq to help secure the release of Australian hostage Douglas Wood. He spent more than a month there, working with the Australian emergency response team. Wood was released on June 15 after Iraqi and US forces apparently stumbled upon a house where he was being held. The Australian government, and now Wood, have praised the efforts of the Iraqi security forces, but Al Hilaly believes that some grave miscalculations were made by those in charge. He spoke to 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly's Pip Hinman via his interpreter Keysar Trad.
Is it true that the release of Douglas Wood had already been arranged and he was in a "transit" house ready to be collected before the raid by US and Iraqi forces took place?
Yes, this is beyond doubt. He was taken from the last station before being handed over; he was going to be handed over within hours to the Hotel Baghdad. Nick Warner, the [Australian] head of the emergency response team, knew this, as I had already told him.
Why do you think the Australian government is playing up the role of the Iraqi security forces in Wood's release?
What we know for certain is that the Iraqi forces acknowledged they stumbled on Wood by chance. How can they say they succeeded when it was by chance?
Do you know if anyone else was hurt or injured in this operation?
Not during the raid. The people with Douglas Wood were unarmed.
I have grave doubts about the claim made by the Iraqis that the [two] people who were captured with Wood were killed a month ago. Their families were not contacted to identify the bodies until June 17. This was two days after the release of Douglas Wood. It is summer in Iraq; temperatures are in the high 40s, and so corpses decompose very quickly in such conditions. It is unlikely that their corpses were kept in the morgue freezer for a month. Under Islamic law, the dead are buried very quickly, preferably on the same day. Further, power is rationed in Iraq, and valuable power would not be wasted on corpses for a whole month.
I was in daily contact with their families, and I knew that they were still waiting for their sons' release.
[According to Trad, Sheikh Al Hilaly was negotiating with the Australian foreign affairs department to get visas for these two Iraqis and their families to go to a Western country. He insisted that they should be released with Wood, and wouldn't have been worried about ensuring the release of all three if he had reason to believe that they were already dead.]
Wood and his family have retracted their calls for the occupying troops to leave Iraq. What would the consequences of this be for any future hostages?
I now fear that any Australian captured in Iraq is likely to be decapitated within 24 hours after this fiasco.
How do you think peace can come to Iraq?
After living there and seeing the suffering of the Iraqi people, I have a vision and a strategy for its future. I hope Australia will play a positive role in stopping civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. This must start with the coalition treating Iraqis with respect, otherwise Iraq lives over a volcano of gunpowder. The US will never win; it will be a point of shame in their history. It claims to be seeking to create peace, but all it has succeeded in doing is creating chaos.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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