Iraq offline.

U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles, aimed at destroying Saddam Hussein's propaganda machine, have left a key Iraqi government site online, still displaying controversial photos of American POWs and dead soldiers. Meanwhile, the air strikes appear to have disabled the primary Internet access points used by average citizens of Baghdad.
The attacks, which began early Saturday morning, Baghdad time, reportedly destroyed several satellite dishes and an Internet server housed at Iraq's Ministry of Information building. Local phone service in the city was also reportedly disrupted by separate missile strikes on two telecommunications switching centers.
Yet Babil Online, the home page of an Iraqi newspaper run by Saddam Hussein's son Uday, was still reachable following the bombing.
A headline atop the front page of Babil Online exhorts visitors to read an article about the war, which includes several postmortem photos of what appear to be U.S. troops. The images were displayed last week on Qatar-based Al-Jazeera TV. Subsequently, the TV network's Web site came under repeated denial-of-service attacks.
Meanwhile, two primary Internet access points for Iraqi citizens -- among them a high-profile blogger using the alias "Salam Pax" -- have been unreachable since the weekend.

Haven't had much to say about Salam Pax here, largely cos everyone else in blogland was picking up on him and was more interested in him than I was. Anyway, I gather part of the reason he's not posted of late is due to his being in hospital or something, so if you've been wondering where is, apparently that's where. Can't remember offhand where I read this, but that's the story as far as I know...

UPDATE: just remembered it was at John Quiggin's.

posted by James Russell | 4:11 PM