Comical Ali
Comical Ali is a website devoted to spoofing the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, of the regime of Saddam Hussein during the Iraq War in 2003. Its name parodies Chemical Ali.Nicknamed Comical Ali by the western media as a pun on the nickname of his colleague Chemical Ali, the Information Minister became a fixture of fun for his passionate but increasingly ludicrous descriptions of the war and his certainty that Iraq would win and for his assertion that the soldiers from the armies of the United States, United Kingdom would all commit mass suicide when faced with attack by Saddam's army.
The site, which parodies minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf is billed as a "comical view of history's funniest straight man." It features sound-bites of the minister, as well as Photoshop-type doctored pictures of him on the Star Wars Death Star, at The Battle of Waterloo and at the D-Day landings - in all cases maintaining that "everything is just fine."
Around April 11, 2003, the site was forced to be removed from the Internet, due to an unsuspected strain on its server, successfully pledging to readers to be back online on a new server within 24 hours. The site read: "If we had known it was going to be this popular we would have put it on its own server from the beginning." They boasted that at times, the site saw 4000 visitors a second.
The IIM is somewhat more commonly called (in terms of Google hits) 'Baghdad Bob'.
