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Europe
Baghdad’s Ambassador To Russia Drops Out of Sight
2003-04-14
Edited slightly for length
Iraq's ambassador to Russia has not been seen in public or spoken to the media for days, despite his love for publicity and penchant for statements of bravado. Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth disappeared from public life as the government he represented collapsed sometime last week. Embassy officials refused to say Monday whether the silence is merely an existential crisis or a prologue to an attempt to apply for political asylum in Russia. "Tomorrow," was the recurring refrain from officials, despite daily requests for interviews over the past week.

The embassy has escaped the wrath of Iraqi exiles, who stormed the London embassy last week, tearing down pictures of Hussein and whacking them with their shoes. Kurds protested outside the embassy in Stockholm, and police with submachine guns now patrol the embassy in Berlin. A Russian driver, cleaning out the dilapidated buses that the embassy uses to drive the children of embassy staff to an Arabic school near the Kremlin, said the children were continuing to attend classes until the May holidays. He didn't know what would happen after that.

An embassy official told Kommersant that he had not heard from his family in Baghdad since the start of the war. "It's all in the hands of Allah," he said.
Iraqi ambassadors around the world are in diplomatic limbo. Some have accepted the end of their government and asked for political asylum, while others are standing firm. The Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Al-Douri, was the first to admit defeat, saying last Wednesday that "the game is over." The ambassador in Armenia soon followed. The ambassador in Egypt, Mohsen Khalil, has applied and received asylum in Yemen. The ambassador to China has remained defiant, saying televised and photographed scenes of celebrating Iraqis were fake. Officials at the Iraqi Embassy in Minsk said Monday that they would comment "tomorrow." No one answered the telephone at the embassy in Kiev.
It all sounds so... desolate. Too bad. How 'bout them Cubs?
Iraq's ambassador to Russia, who was appointed to the post on Sept. 26, 2002, never managed to match the boundless optimism of Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, whose aphorisms of unrealistic defiance before he disappeared last week have become a cult favorite on the Internet. But Kunfuth, a former translator for Hussein, remained vocally defiant of the United States until the end, even joking on April Fools' Day that the Americans had fired a nuclear missile on coalition troops. There are no pictures of Hussein outside the embassy now. Kommersant reported it found pictures plastered outside and a whole gallery inside — Hussein with a glass of wine, Hussein with flowers — on a visit last Friday. Early Monday afternoon, the ambassador's car pulled up in front of the building with a small Iraqi flag fluttering on the hood. A man resembling Kunfuth walked out of the embassy, briefly glanced in the direction of the journalists outside the embassy gates and drove away.
Posted by:Tadderly

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