[1][3] He had spent the seven years prior to the USinvasion in Irbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in internal exile.
Prior to his short career in journalism, he had served as an anatomy professor at Mosul University,[4] and a Kurdish translator.
[5] Shortly after the USA occupied Iraq, in 2003, WBUR, a PBS station in Boston, broadcast a documentary about Shawkat.
Goldfarb only worked with Shawkat briefly, butwould describe them as close friends, due to the intensity of the period,.
He wrote a book about Shawkat, after his death, entitled Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq, and broadcast several BBC podcasts focused around Shawkat's family was coping with the US occupation, and the opposition members who assassinated the head of their family.