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My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

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Hello and welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm

Frahana Hither. Today we go back to August 1990 when the Iraqi dictator Saddam

Hussein took hundreds of foreign nationals hostage in the build up to the first Gulf War.

I've been hearing the story of a British Muslim family who became some of the so-called human shields.

Samir Rahim was nine years old in July 1990 when he visited Southern Iraq to make a pilgrimage with his family.

With him were his father, Siddhik, his mother Yasmin, and his 13-year-old sister, Ruhi.

As Shia Muslims, we went to visit Karabala and Najr during the Holy Month of Muharam and took part in the various ceremonies there and visited religious figures.

On August the 2nd the family had finished their pilgrimage and returned to Baghdad.

They were getting ready for their flight back to London when they were woken up by gunfire.

And my dad went out into the street and I went with him and we saw people firing into the air and we thought what's happening.

They seemed to be celebrating something. Our first instinct was that Saddam had been overthrown,

because we knew he was a nasty dictator and that's what happens to nasty dictators. They get overthrown.

So we were a little bit concerned, you know, the instability that was going to maybe result.

So we went back to the hotel and we tried to watch some Iraqi television to work out what was actually happening.

But because we didn't understand the language, it was quite difficult for us to do that.

We had a tape recorder, my sister had brought along, and it also had a radio function.

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