14On 20 June 2006, Ghassan called me and asked me to go somewhere with him. ‘Get changed. I’ll come and pick you up in a few minutes,’ he said. I got changed quickly and waited for him to come to my room. He didn’t take long. I got in the car and he drove off towards the place he wanted to take me. ‘Do you remember that Abu Faris that I told you about?’ he asked me on the way. I remembered the name immediately. He was the poet who was captured during the Iraqi occupation because of the poems and songs he wrote urging people to resist. Ghassan told me he was going to say his last farewells to Abu Faris, whose remains had been found in a mass grave near Karbala in Iraq and were now going to be buried in Kuwait. I couldn’t see any reason why this called for Ghassan to take me along with him.
