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Hello, I'm Lewis Alsamari. Welcome to my site. I'm an actor and human rights activist based in the UK, and have recently played a lead role in Paul Greengrass's OSCAR nominated and BAFTA winning movie United 93.

Part of the reason Paul chose me for the film was because he was interested in my life story. I escaped Saddam Hussein's regime and army when I was a teenager, which took me on a more bizarre and dangerous journey than I could ever have imagined. I also had to work out how to get my family out of Abu Ghraib prison after they were thrown in there as punishment for my own escape. In that process, I was shot and injured by my own Iraqi comrades, fled across the desert almost eaten alive by wolves, and embarked on the dangerous and dark underworld of people smugglers and illegal border crossing to get myself and my family to safety.

My real life biography - OUT OF IRAQ - published in Hardback by Random House UK and USA is in all major stores worldwide and International airports across the world. For an extract of the book, a synopsis or to order a signed copy click here or image above. To purchase click:

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OUT OF IRAQ: 'Awesome...Immense' - Reviewed by Fiona Atherton

(The Scotsman Newspaper ~ 11 August 2007 ~ )

The immense burden of his epic struggle makes its weight felt. Never is that personal burden more apparent than in descriptions of the horrors that his family endures, both at the hands of the Iraqi intelligence service and in the Malaysian prison where they are detained after been denied entry on fake passports. The floor "black with dirt and covered with a ghoulish human kaleidoscope of prostrate bodies", the prison is no less barbarous than Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib, to where Alsamari's family is eventually returned. It is no wonder, then, that he has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that undoubtedly affects the narrative. The distance that he has understandably placed between himself and the traumas he has survived creates a frigidity between storyteller and story, but one that, far from leaving the narrative lacking in feeling, only serves to deepen our sympathy for everything that this man has overcome. Alsamari's story is one that certainly warrants a book.

For full article in THE SCOTSMAN click HERE