Khalid Kishtainy steps off a C-130 Hercules at Baghdad International Airport, Iraq, Oct. 21, 2003. Kishtainy is an Iraqi novelist and in 2003 also a columnist for the Asharq Al-Awsat Arabic newspaper in London. Before 2003, he was last in Baghdad in 1989 before he left for fear of his life. The former Saddam Hussein regime had two death sentences on Kishtainy for a book he wrote about the regime. The author grew up in Baghdad, and he considers it his hometown.