As athletes in Beijing vie for medals, 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.

Ahmed, 27, now lives in a Baghdad University dormitory, still running, still winning races, still struggling with the despair that haunts every turn around the track where he trains. The track, the other athletes and even his tracksuit have become replacements for the family he lost.

“I still feel it’s a dream. It is too difficult to understand and digest such a horrible thing,” Ahmed said.

Until then, security problems in the province, a stronghold of al-Qaeda in Iraq, had kept him from visiting the field where his relatives were hastily buried.

Although security has improved, insurgents remain active. People like Ahmed, who is Iraq’s champion in the half-marathon and 5,000-metre runs, are targets in the insurgents’ quest to wipe out those they consider un-Islamic or supportive of the US-backed Government.

Under Saddam Hussein, sports figures who failed to win medals faced torture at the hands of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s son, who was President of the Iraqi National Olympic Committee. After the fall of Saddam, athletes became prey of kidnapping gangs looking for ransoms and insurgents who consider them apostates. In the most notorious case, 15 members of a taekwondo martial art 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.

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