Question? Iraq is a very dangerous country. Have you been to Iraq, and what was the purpose of your visit? Did you ever meet Saddam Hussein, the infamous President, who was knowcn as the butcher of Baghdad?
Answer: I have visited Iraq, once known as Mesopotamia, on three different occasions. I went to explore Babylon, Nineveh, and Nimrud, all great cities of the Bible. On my third visit, I was place under house arrest by Saddam whom I never met personally. We had inadvertently taken pictures of one of his palaces, and this very quickly let to our arrest. After three tense days, the house arrest incident in Baghdad was resolved.
I then traveled down to Babylon, where another crisis of an ever greater magnitude suddenly burst upon us. I was innocently exploring the remains of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace with my TV crew when unexpectedly we were confronted by helicopter gunships overhead. Iraqi soldiers were soon demanding an explanation. This was a very tense and dangerous moment. We were carrying a very large TV tripod case that could easily have been, in their eyes, a bazooka or some other weapon. We were seen as a very real threat to Saddam Hussein who coincidentally had chose to visit Babylon at the very same time we were there. He had passed just 100 yards from where we were filming in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, an elevated spot overlooking the road. had we been foreign hostile agents carrying an actual bazooka, on a mission to kill Saddam, the future of Iraq, the Middle East, and America could have been very different.
We showed the captain our official papers with permission to visit Babylon, and the crisis was resolved. Saddam continued on and we kept videotaping the archaeological wonders of ancient Babylon, the city of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. We could easily have been shot. Saddam was a viscous killer, and it was the providence of God that delivered us.