BAGHDAD — As athletes in Beijing vie for medals, fame and fortune, Iraqi distance runner Mahmoud Kamil Ahmed competes thousands of miles away for a different reason: to forget.
A year ago, while Ahmed trained in Cairo, Sunni Muslim insurgents surrounded his family's homestead in Diyala province, machine guns and rockets blazing. All 27 of his relatives inside were killed, including his mother, father and two brothers.
Now, the 27-year-old lives in a Baghdad University dorm, still running, still winning some races, still struggling with the despair that haunts every turn around the searing track where he trains. The track, the other athletes and even his tracksuit have become replacements for the family he lost.
"I am still feeling that it is a dream. It is too difficult to understand and digest such a horrible thing," Ahmed said last month, shortly after visiting his family's grave site for the first time. Until then, security problems in the area, a stronghold of Al Qaeda in Iraq, had kept him from visiting the lonely field where his relatives were hastily buried.
Although security has improved, insurgents remain active in the area, and people like Ahmed, who is Iraq's half-marathon and 5,000-meter champion, are targets in their quest to wipe out those they consider un-Islamic or supportive of the U.S.-backed government. His family's slaughter underscored the brutality of their methods and highlighted the threats long faced by athletes.
Under dictator Saddam Hussein, sports figures who failed to win medals faced beatings and torture at the hands of Hussein's son Uday, who was president of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee.
After the fall of Hussein, athletes became prey of kidnapping gangs looking for ransoms or insurgents who consider them apostates. In the most notorious case, 15 members of a taekwondo team, many of whom had hoped to compete in the Olympics, were abducted in May 2006. The remains of 13 were discovered a year later.
Ahmed says his relatives were targeted because one of his brothers was a judge and because Ahmed had represented Iraq in international competitions. "They considered us apostates from Islam," he said of the gunmen who crept up on the family compound the afternoon of July 27, 2007.
It took Ahmed several days to learn what had happened. He had become worried when he phoned from Cairo and nobody in the village of Mahbobiya, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, answered.
