By Jo Wilding

We made a load of plans for the Boomchucka Clowns to go back to Iraq this autumn, compiled an info sheet for people who wanted to join the circus, planned for some fundraising, made a list of useful stuff and people to blag it off, agreed who was going to do what.

And then Ghareeb was dead; Ghareeb who took me to Falluja, who took countless foreigners to the places he thought we could make a difference, Ghareeb with the fiery temper that drove me nuts, who sometimes liked to exaggerate, who always loved to gossip – Ewa used to say a big bird told her everything, Ghareeb whose cigarette end lit the way through the pitch dark streets of Falluja, who drove the ambulance that was shot at with us in it, who I called Azzam in the stories from there, who doesn’t need a disguise any more, who seemed to know everyone, who’d fled his native Palestine after working for freedom there, making his home in Iraq instead, is dead.

Surely someone so big couldn’t die, but it seems like bullets don’t discriminate. He was driving with the convoy that included foreign journalists and activists and Italian Red Cross workers in late August. Enzo, a Red Cross volunteer, freelance journalist and blogger, was kidnapped and killed. Even though I spoke to him on the phone only a couple of weeks before and he was fine, all it took was a bullet and now he’s dead.

And then the two Simonas, Mahnoaz and Dr Raad were kidnapped, seized in broad daylight by unmasked, smart, well-fed men, apparently working on some kind of covert operation rather than the usual chaotic opportunistic roadside bandit episodes, and we knew there was no way the clowns could go back as planned.