Dying police state targeted an unlikely man

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The pounding on his door sometime after midnight, upstairs in a small hotel, startled the man awake. When he went to open it, the gunmen pushed in, surrounded him and hustled him out, then ransacked the room.

Driving away with him, they stopped on a deserted road. "It would be better if we killed you here," they said.

He couldn't believe it. In 12 years of relief work on behalf of the Iraqi people, he had become a well-known humanitarian figure in Baghdad, earning the government's gratitude.

Now, as U.S. troops hammered on the city's door April 4, Saddam Hussein's secret police had even turned on Khaled al-Sudani.

The story of al-Sudani's four-day imprisonment represents a bizarre last gasp of a dying police state that had terrorized its own people for decades with arbitrary arrest, inhuman imprisonment and secret execution.

Three weeks earlier, on the day the American bombing began, al-Sudani -- director of a four-country region for the Sudan-based Islamic Relief Agency -- sped to Baghdad in charge of a small aid convoy, over the desert highway from his headquarters in Jordan. He was a trailblazer for columns of aid workers expected to stream into Iraq in coming weeks.

Al-Sudani, 51, a former Jordanian army officer who was born in Sudan, wins lasting respect from people who observe him in action. They include John Flanagan, 70, a retired Irish businessman who came on his own to Baghdad to comfort war victims and who got swept up in the secret police raid with al-Sudani at the Funar Hotel.

"He's a powerhouse of energy," Flanagan said of his cellmate. "He's a very strong character, a man of profound integrity."

Al-Sudani braved U.S. bombs once before to help ordinary Iraqis. During four days of air attacks in 1998, he brought in medicines critically needed by Baghdad hospitals, an act that earned him a letter of gratitude from the health minister.

That's one reason he was stunned when, after arresting him, the secret police accused him of spying for the Americans. "I said to them, 'After all this time, I'm a spy?"'

He knew who his captors were -- not only that they were Mukhabarat, from the intelligence service, but also the name of his chief interrogator, a colonel. But he doesn't know why they seized him.

Associates suggest they wanted his money and computer equipment, and possibly his Jordanian and Sudanese passports to aid the escape of high-ranking members of the falling regime.

In those hours before dawn April 4, their captors threw al-Sudani and Flanagan into tiny concrete cells in a Baghdad police station, dark places filled with garbage and the reek of urine and feces. Given no water that first day, al-Sudani managed to drink from a pipe. For two days, they were given no food, until al-Sudani pulled hidden Iraqi dinars from a money belt and bribed a police guard for bread.

The aid official was sharply questioned about his supposed espionage by the Mukhabarat colonel. "I told him, I came to help,"' al-Sudani recalled. "He said, 'We don't need your help!"'

In the sleepless nights, al-Sudani despaired. "I knew in my mind they will kill me."

On the third day, they were pulled from their cells and driven across Baghdad in police vehicles with sirens blaring, terrified their end was near. It turned out the Mukhabarat, for some reason, wanted them moved, but other jailers rejected them for improper paperwork -- a final irony of a collapsing bureaucracy.

Back now in a single cell in their original jail, they heard helicopters and the sound of battle as U.S. troops approached on the afternoon of April 8. Their police jailers fled, but first -- fearing the Mukhabarat no longer -- they unlocked the cell door.

Emerging into the sunlight, al-Sudani and Flanagan got word to friends, who retrieved them from the embattled area.

Helplessly angry, still perplexed, the veteran aid organizer could only plunge back into helping the Iraqi people, help needed now more than ever. He organized food and other necessities and delivered them to an orphanage that had been neglected during his absence.

To al-Sudani, the fact that he survived represents a second chance.

"They gave me another life to help people," he said. "I have to continue my work."