If ever you are in Baghdad town, tell the taxi drivers that Saddam sent you. Another strange story from Ireland, this time from the Impartial Reporter, in Co. Fermanagh, telling how the middle eastern tyrant saved an Irish schoolteacher from kerbside rip-off merchants.

Thanks to Justin for this one …

Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 09:21:19 +0100
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: And on the lighter side…

http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=429949

Irish farmer is ‘a cut above the rest’

Paper Clips: A round-up of the weekly press

By Tony Bailie

MOST of the north’s regional papers again carried stories last week giving a local perspective on the war in Iraq, but the most remarkable was in the Impartial Reporter.

Fermanagh man Tom Daly (72) is a former schoolteacher and lecturer who spent 15 years working in the Middle East.

In an interview with the paper Mr Daly told how in 1988 he arrived in Baghdad and was on his way to the city of Basra to take up a lecturing post.

He told the paper: “I had just flown into the country and landed at Baghdad airport in the dead of night. I took a taxi to the bus station to make my way down to Basra which was about 60 kilometres away.

“All these taxi drivers were coming down to me offering to take my bags and drive me down to Basra for 60 quid and I wasn’t sure what to do.

“Then a man in a long dark coat came over to me, put his hand up and said: ‘Don’t listen to them. Take a taxi (sic), it will cost you ?10’.

“I thought this was a much better idea and was glad of the help. All the taxi drivers had also backed away so I asked some of them afterwards: ‘Who was that man?’

and they said: ‘That was Mr Saddam Hussein’.”

…

— Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk