“As long as there is sun, there is life,” were Imam Al-Laythi’s first written words to reach IslamOnline.net’s Cairo office from pre-war Iraq. They were posted on March 15, 2003, just five days before the Anglo-American offensive on the country.

Although those first words were a quote taken from an Iraqi mother that had promised she would send her husband and children to resist what she referred to as “the occupation,” those same words could just as easily be the motto of Al-Laythi’s life.

Al-Laythi was persistent in achieving his life-long dream of becoming a journalist. From majoring in mathematics at Egypt’s Ain Shams University to facing torture and a death sentence by a group of Iraqi Shiites as a war correspondent for IslamOnline, Al-Laythi, now 37, “found himself” in war-torn Iraq.

“I was expecting to find the Iraqi people either fleeing the country or expectantly waiting in their homes for the warning sirens to run to the nearest bomb shelter,” wrote Al-Laythi in that first article. To his astonishment, he found Iraqis returning home from abroad to be with their loved ones. He also found the streets of Baghdad exuberant with life.

“The book shops in Al-Mutanabi Market were crowded with people, as if their ears had been deafened to America’s threats,” he wrote. Describing a scene from an Iraqi coffee shop, this mathematician turned war correspondent depicts a picture “reminiscent of the 1940s,” with one elderly man quietly pondering his prayer beads while another younger man slowly inhales his sheesha.

“The reaction I received from that first article was unexpected,” says Al-Laythi. “Being a war correspondent is the most difficult job in journalism, and I didn’t have any previous experience or training as a journalist,” he explained.

It seemed what readers really wanted was the human side of the Iraqi story. And that is what Al-Laythi gave them.

That wasn’t as difficult for him as he had expected. Al-Laythi had been a storywriter since he was only a teenager, writing and directing school and university plays with a passion. Having studied two years of cinema while at the same time studying for a bachelor’s in math, Al-Laythi held on to his life-long dream of becoming a journalist after graduation.

Al-Laythi was only 20 when he managed to land a job in Egyptian television, where he prepared and assisted in directing several educational programs. That ended, to his disappointment, in 1992, after which he went on to tackle a long list of jobs ranging from writing children’s cartoon strips to setting up his own company for producing historical TV series, which he left after directing 15 episodes.

Al-Laythi was finally hired by IOL in 2000 as editor of its audio/video department. Feeling unsatisfied with the capabilities of a Web site in this area, he was getting frustrated. Finally an opportunity revealed itself, and he grabbed at it.

“I heard that one of our news editors was getting his passport ready to cover the war in Iraq,” says Al-Laythi. Al-Laythi approached IOL’s editor-in-chief with a well-devised plan on how he would cover the war if he was also sent by the Cairo office.

“He asked me, ‘Have you ever seen a war?’ I replied, ‘I was never even enrolled in the army.’ He asked me, ‘Will you be able to withstand the bombing?’ I replied, ‘I will!’”

Only a week before the war erupted, Imam Al-Laythi made his first step in Iraq.

“Imam’s performance in Iraq was distinguished due to his focus on human interest stories,” says Hussam Assayed, Head of IOL’s news desk. Assayed proudly says that IslamOnline was one of the first media organizations to cover the human and social sides of the Iraqi story, as opposed to the political side. “And discounting journalists that died in Iraq, we were amongst the most that faced troubles in the country,” he adds.

“Troubles” is an understatement.

Al-Laythi was captured and tortured by a group of Iraqi Shiites in October 2003. On his way to do a story on human rights issues inside Iraqi prisons, self-imposed Basra security police decided that Al-Laythi was an imminent danger to the country. “Their logic was, you are Egyptian, you are an Arab, you are a bomber,” explained Al-Laythi, in reference to the pockets of resistance to occupation that had emerged in the city.

IslamOnline turned into a beehive. Word arrived from the Iraqis that had accompanied Al-Laythi at the time, and were subsequently released, that his life was at stake. “Calls were made to the people in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and the UK who might have influence with his captors,” explains Hussam Assyed, Head of IOL’s news desk.

After a week of ruthless beatings by his captors, Al-Laythi was finally blindfolded, transferred and made to face a pole when they reached their destination. “I heard the guns loading, and a death sentence was read.”

“They ordered me to sit. I refused. I was not going to die sitting,” says Al-Laythi. But to his surprise, his blindfold was suddenly removed and he found himself in the custody of the British forces.

“It was all a dramatic show,” he says. “They just wanted to frighten me.”

Al-Laythi was finally returned to Baghdad after a week of debriefing with the British forces. One week later, he made his way back to Cairo.

Despite this most harrowing of experiences and the pleads of his wife and mother, he decided to return to Iraq. He was back and sending in news stories by the beginning of March 2004.

“Iraq is a gold mine of work,” he explains. “I have a story for a movie, a book and jokes to last a lifetime. Work for me is a mood. I have to be convinced with what I’m doing and love it. Afterwards, what happens is irrelevant to me,” he says.

Magdy Said, close friend and colleague, believes that Al-Laythi has an inherent passion for adventure bred by his upbringing in the vibrant surroundings of Old Cairo’s Bab Al-Shi`riyah neighborhood, together with his background as a scriptwriter. “It’s like he’s living an action-packed film,” he says. “Being in the midst of a dynamic environment feeds his imagination and his literary production,” reasons Said.

Nevertheless, Al-Laythi’s stay in Iraq this time lasted for only 30 days, as opposed to his previous 45-day stays in the four separate visits he had made to the country since the beginning of the war.

Claiming to have returned for “administrative reasons,” Al-Laythi nevertheless states in a by-the-way tone that the situation in Iraq was becoming dangerous for the likes of him.

Al-Laythi had a long list of contacts amongst the Iraqi Sunnis. “For an Arab, that eventually turns into a dangerous situation,” he explains, referring to Sunni-Shiite tensions in the country.

Only three days before his return to Cairo, Al-Laythi had a brush with death while standing in the garden of IOL’s Iraq headquarters. “A bullet seemed to come out of nowhere and rushed by my head,” he explains.

Torn between his wife and eight-year-old son’s refusal that he return, and his newfound love of war correspondence, Al-Laythi is reluctant to rule out returning to Iraq if the situation improves. “Preparations are currently being made for me to eventually go back to the country, but I will have to be provided with strong security,” he says. That might be detrimental to his job as a journalist, as that, together with the deteriorating security situation in the country, will make moving around very difficult for him.

Al-Laythi’s last written words from Iraq? They were written on March 17, 2004, one year after he typed his first words. Quoting Arab governments at the end of an interview with the leader of Iraq’s Muslim Brotherhood on his opinion of the United States’ “Greater Middle East Initiative,” Al-Laythi wrote, “Change must come from inside.”