Safe to come out

last updated 8 January 2015

Shammar, Iraq

An Iraqi man has become a national celebrity after emerging from 22 years of hiding in a dugout he built behind a wall in his mother’s house. Jawad Amer Sayed, now 49, went into hiding in the 3-by-7-foot space in 1981 after two of his friends, fellow members of a banned Shiite Muslim party, were executed by the regime of Saddam Hussein. His dugout had a little toilet, an air vent, and a well, and his mother passed him food through a trap door. Sayed stumbled out of his hideout, several inches shorter and missing most of his teeth, the day after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces. “I enjoy sleeping outside now,” he told The Washington Post. “Looking at the stars.”