Following a two-month war hiatus, Iraq's Uruklink website is expected to return to the Internet this week.
Formerly the official homepage of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, the site has been scrubbed clean of any traces of the fallen dictator, according to officials with Iraq's State Company for Internet Services, or SCIS.
Purging the government-controlled ISP of Saddam loyalists, however, is proving more difficult, says Ala'a Hassan Harif, 29, lead system administrator and research-and-development manager for SCIS.
"The problem is very global and very dangerous," said Harif. "The Iraqi people can't accept people who used to serve the old regime."
According to Harif, the general manager of SCIS, Shakir Abdulla, has quietly removed from his office a prominent photo of himself proudly shaking hands with Saddam during a 2001 meeting. While Abdulla was not a registered member of Saddam's Ba'ath political party, Harif insists Abdulla was a devoted, if opportunistic, follower.
"In Iraq, you can't be a general manager for 16 years continuously unless the regime is completely sure of you and you are serving the regime," said Harif. "Your attitude, action, beliefs and thoughts must be absolutely compatible with the regime."
On April 16, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority banned the Ba'ath party and the display of images of Saddam.
Abdulla did not respond to interview requests. Last month, he told the Associated Press that the Internet is "a gate to the 21st century for Iraqis who have been living in a dark age."
Yet for Harif and other SCIS engineers, the darkness descended on the Iraqi ISP soon after Abdulla arrived in 2001. That's when Osama Khalid, the company's popular founder, was mysteriously fired by the Minister of Transport and Communication, and replaced as general manager by Abdulla.
Shortly thereafter, Saddam ordered two officers from Iraq's Ministry of Defense to monitor SCIS, according to Harif.
When asked about widespread rumors that the Iraqi government spied on SCIS customers, Harif declined to answer.
"It is not very safe here today to say all the information," Harif said. "We still have people who support the old regime."
To the astonishment of some SCIS staff, when the Coalition Provisional Authority abolished Iraq's Ministry of Defense last month, Abdulla made the two defense officers employees of SCIS. They remain on the company payroll today, according to Harif.
Officials from the provisional authority, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is leading the rebuilding effort in Iraq, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the management of SCIS.
So far, aside from management appointments, the United States has not interceded in running SCIS. According to Harif, the Coalition Provisional Authority has not asked to monitor the service for evidence of pro-Saddam organizing. Nor have authorities requested backups of archived e-mails from the ISP's users for use in investigating possible war crimes or searching for weapons of mass destruction.
Ahmed Shames, chairman of the Iraqi Prospect Organisation, a U.K.-based group of Iraqi exiles seeking to establish democracy in Iraq, said the presence of Abdulla and other Saddam loyalists at SCIS could create problems for the reconstruction effort.
"The media sector in Iraq is a very important factor in building democracy," Shames said. "That's why it is essential that it is managed by people who are capable of creating a free media atmosphere."
When Harif complained to the Coalition Provisional Authority earlier this month about the situation at SCIS, he was rebuffed. Rather than giving Abdulla the boot, the provisional authority last week promoted Abdulla to the position of consultant to the Ministry of Transport and Communications, which oversees SCIS, according to Harif.
Some of Harif's bitterness toward Abdulla appears to be personal. When the war began, Abdulla stripped him of his title as manager of the Internet department at SCIS and gave the position to one of Harif's colleagues.
"Shakir told me, 'We need a strong man to run the department and face the enemy,'" said Harif.
Yet Harif says he risked his life to protect the company's assets during the war. Indeed, when coalition cruise missiles slammed into the Information Ministry building in Baghdad just past midnight on March 29, many of Harif's friends assumed he was killed in the blast.
Harif was renowned for putting in 20-hour days in SCIS' main office in the Information Ministry building. His reputation as a nerdy workaholic earned him the nickname "The Worm" among friends and colleagues.
It also garnered Harif the dubious honor of regularly being summoned in the middle of the night to the offices of Uday Hussein's Iraq National Olympic Committee to fix the organization's Internet link or to restart its Web server.
As it turned out, Harif was not in the server room on the top floor of the Information Ministry early that Saturday morning, when Tomahawk missiles struck the roof, taking out SCIS' satellite dishes and cutting off Baghdad's connection to the Internet for nearly two months.
On a hunch that the building would be targeted by coalition bombers -- Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf occupied offices three floors below -- Harif had spent the night in an SCIS service center in Baghdad's Hay Al-Adel district, where he could remotely monitor the ISP's servers.
When the smoke cleared the next day, Harif and a handful of other SCIS staffers picked their way through shards of glass and shattered furniture in their Information Ministry offices. They salvaged servers and other computer hardware and moved it into the protection of their homes.
Their foresight may have saved Iraq's only ISP. After Baghdad fell to coalition troops on April 9, the Information Ministry was vandalized and set ablaze. Internet cafes were ransacked. Looters ransacked warehouses containing millions of dollars of SCIS computer gear, according to Harif.
Harif stayed in the low-slung SCIS office on Central Market Street in Hay Al-Adel to protect the company's remaining equipment from looters. As relative calm was restored approximately 10 days later, he and other technicians began rigging up a backup satellite station atop the building's roof and reconnecting the computers.
Once they were ready to switch on the satellite Internet link, Harif and a couple other techies from SCIS visited a U.S. Marine Corps encampment in a nearby high school.
"We needed to tell the U.S. troops about our frequency of transmission, and make them consider it as a friendly frequency," said Harif, who also provided the troops with the latitude and longitude of the new SCIS headquarters building.
At the end of May, SCIS restored Internet connectivity and e-mail service to the 20,000 users of its Uruklink- and Warkaa-branded Internet services.
At first, the service was only available during the day, due to the unstable electrical supply in Baghdad and the company's reliance on manually operated backup generators. Iraqis crowded the SCIS Internet center in Hay Al-Adel to check their messages and contact relatives and friends abroad, Harif said.
Prior to the war, Iraq's government-controlled Internet service might have appeared to outsiders as merely a propaganda arm of Saddam's regime. But to Harif and the group of techies who kept Uruklink online, the ISP provided a vital link to the outside world for Iraq's isolated citizens.
"We risked ourselves to make the Internet service available to Iraqis," said Harif. "Many people, especially in the committee of the national security, wanted to see it shut down."
Beginning in 2000, Harif and the technical staff at SCIS, hamstrung by trade embargos, had put in long hours cobbling together bootlegged software and black market hardware to build the ISP, which at its peak operated approximately 40 Internet centers in central Iraq and served some 2 million users.
To keep the service running, SCIS engineers fended off denial-of-service attacks, domain hijackings and other foreign hacker intrusions, not to mention regular investigations from suspicious Iraqi government officials.
Harif insists that, contrary to media reports, SCIS did not disconnect its e-mail servers last January following a propaganda spam campaign from the U.S. military.
"Iraqis depended on the Internet for communicating with their relatives outside Iraq," he said. "We, the technical staff of this company, said there is no harm from this service."
Ironically, it was Operation Iraqi Freedom that ultimately severed Iraq's residents from the Internet.
According to Harif, the delay in bringing the Uruklink website back online is due to security concerns. While the site's content has been ready for weeks, he said technicians needed extra time to harden the underlying server software against electronic attacks.
As SCIS struggles through its postwar reconstruction, Iraq's first private ISPs are springing up, opening Internet cafes in Baghdad and other cities. In addition, the United States is helping set up community Internet centers, as it did in late May in the southern port city of Umm Qasr.
Harif says SCIS, once the monopoly Internet service provider in Iraq, is ready for competition. He claims its Internet center features faster computers and connections than its competitors. And its rates -- about $1 per hour -- are lower than other ISPs, according to Harif.
Unlike in the past, SCIS now allows customers to use online chat services, and doesn't block any Web destinations aside from pornography sites.
When the rest of Iraq's commercial infrastructure stabilizes, SCIS has plans to launch e-commerce efforts and offer Web-hosting services. The company also hopes to finally activate Iraq's official top-level domain name suffix: .iq.
