On 16 November , al-Zaidi was kidnapped by unknown assailants in Baghdad. President George W. Bush during a Baghdad press conference while shouting "this is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog". Al-Zaidi suffered injuries as he was taken into custody and some sources said he was tortured during his initial detention.

‘IT’S NOT IN MY HANDS’
Digging ditches to sleep in, dodging gunfire — a long way from D.C.
All rights reserved. It was one of several forward positions on a front line that ran along the crest of a mountainside and faced west onto the Tigris River Valley. The sun had set on a late summer day—the driest season in Iraq, when land and sky seem to merge. Though this was a vista they could have described in their sleep—for months these soldiers, who were with the peshmerga, the army of Iraqi Kurdistan, had surveilled and mapped and discussed every inch—its fascination and menace never dimmed. Everything they looked at belonged to the Islamic State. It was late July , and the battle for Mosul, long rumored, was finally at hand.
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The way it worked was that they joined the Army because they were starry-eyed or heartbroken or maybe just out of work, and then they were assigned to be in the infantry rather than to something with better odds, like finance or public affairs, and then by chance they were assigned to an infantry division that was about to rotate into the war, and then they were randomly assigned to a combat brigade that included two infantry battalions, one of which was going to a bad place and the other of which was going to a worse place, and then they were assigned to the battalion going to the worse place, and then they were assigned to the company in that battalion which went to the worst place of all. If you listen to the eulogies, so much of war is said to be accidental. Poor Harrelson. Wrong place. Poor Cajimat. Wrong time. But for members of Bravo Company, which in and spent fourteen months in combat, in a bomb-filled neighborhood in east Baghdad, the war eventually felt like the wrong everything. Twenty-five-year-old Nic DeNinno was in 3rd Platoon. He thought of himself as a patriot who had enlisted in the Army for the noblest of reasons: to contribute and to make some kind of difference. Then he punched his first Iraqi in the face, and pushed his first Iraqi down the stairs.
There I am in a chemical weapons suit, flak jacket and helmet. In the background, flames billow from a sabotaged oil plant. Next to me, a Marine young enough to be my son looks calm and determined on his very first day of war. I cover Congress now. I wear a coat and tie. I go home every night and sleep in a bed. It's safe and secure. And sometimes — it's a bit too predictable. In fact, I'm afraid that whatever I cover as a reporter in the future will never match the adrenaline-induced, heart-in-my-throat sense of anticipation that I felt while embedded with the U. Marines on their march from Kuwait to Baghdad.