O Daughter of Babylon

Riad El-Taher arrived in England to study engineering just in time to hear Tony Benn railing against Anthony Eden’s 1956 Suez policy. He was rarely far from politics thereafter.When the UN imposed crippling sanctions on his native land he took Tam Dalyell George Galloway and ex-BBC reporter Tim Llewellyn to Iraq to see their effect. At Dalyell’s suggestion he formed a widely supported organisation to campaign for a reversal of this policy; after the Second Gulf War this redirected its fire at the occupation.He made enemies too and believed he landed in Wandsworth jail as a result. Dalyell who considered Riad to be motivated by ‘an un-self-seeking desire to protect the well-being of people in Iraq’ called his treatment ‘a process of nasty political vengeance.’Neither a Ba’athist nor an emigre oppositionist Riad’s patriotic voice is arguably unique and deserves to be heard. Though polemical and posing uncomfortable questions this is also the story of a remarkably varied life and the wide range of people encountered in it not least among them Saddam Hussein.