In 2003, Saad Eskander had just finished his PhD at the London School of Economics when he decided to return to Baghdad. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime had been overthrown and the dictator was in hiding. Thirteen years after seeking asylum in Britain, the former teenage Kurdish fighter was going home to help rebuild his country. “In London, I was part of a group of Iraqi painters and writers who decided to visit Baghdad to see what we could do in the sphere of cultural education,” he recalls.

It sounds, I suggest, a wildly utopian project to undertake in the middle of a city seething with foreign troops, sectarian militias, gunfire and car bombs. “It is,” says Eskander, looking over his glasses at me with a slight smile, “extremely important. Without cultural education, we cannot emerge from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship properly. Without it, we cannot resist the ideas of religious fundamentalism.” But still, it is an almost hopeless and insanely dangerous thing to try to attempt. “All my friends went back to London,” he concedes. “But I decided to stay.”

Five years on, Eskander, who was born in Baghdad, still works in the Iraqi capital, and continues to insist that cultural education is one of the most important means to reconstruct the Iraqi homeland about which he has come to feel patriotic. “One month after I arrived, I was told there was a job and asked if I’d be interested in applying.” The job turned out to be director general of the Iraq national library and archives. “Under Saddam Hussein, this was an arm of the dictatorship. The [new] minister of culture wanted to ensure it was not a Ba’athist director. He needed someone who could modernise the library, and he knew of my background - fighting with the Kurdish Resistance Movement in northern Iraq, and studying history in London. I was the right person in the right place.”

Why did it appeal to him? “When I went back, I thought I would get a history job at the University of Baghdad. That seemed important. We had a failed state. You have to get back to history to study what went wrong in Iraq. But with this job, I thought I could help Iraqis understand their past and build their future.”

When Eskander talks about his library, he makes it sound a combination of a national healing process, a social crucible for establishing a more egalitarian society and a centre of free inquiry that Iraqi intellectuals have been denied for decades.

But what does cultural education even mean? “We want to change people’s orientation through our books. Otherwise there is no alternative but mosques. I would always say invest in secular education, because religious extremism is a cultural phenomenon - it is not wholly an armed phenomenon. We need to prove to people that there is an alternative.”

This was the vision he brought to his new job. He tells me it was founded, partly, on his sense of the difference between British and American colonial rule in Iraq. It’s an unlikely inspiration. He explains: “The British during and after the first world war built secular education system and museums in Iraq. They didn’t allow religious institutions to intervene in politics. The Americans in Baghdad now have not invested in higher education and culture. These things were at the bottom of their list of priorities. But they are wrong. That is why in Baghdad the universities are dominated by militias.”

Eskander, though, is hardly a flag-waver for Britain. “I am not justifying imperialism. But we must learn from every episode of history. Westerners weren’t the only colonisers. Islam colonised Spain and other countries. I’d be a hypocrite not to say this. I don’t believe in that moral interpretation of history where one group of people have always been the good guys.”

The subject of his PhD thesis was British policy towards the Kurdish Question 1915 to 1923. “The Kurds still blame the British very much for what happened to us. As you know, the first people to use chemical weapons against the Kurds were the RAF. They burned villages, used gas against the Kurds.”

But not only the Kurds, of course: Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for war and air, called for the systematic gassing and bombing of many peoples Britain sought to subjugate as it carved up a new colony on the dunes of Mesopotamia, the mountains of Kurdistan and elsewhere amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. “I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes,” said Churchill, “[to] spread a lively terror.”

Eskander’s ancestors were members of those “uncivilised” tribes, and Britain’s terror tactics inspired later mass murders on his people. In 1988, in Halabja in Kurdistan, for instance, Saddam Hussein’s men killed 5,000 people in a poison gas attack. By then, Eskander had been a member of the Kurdish Resistance Movement for seven years. He lived in the mountains of northern Iraq, and later holed up in Iran and Syria. Only in 1990 did he decide to flee to Britain to seek asylum. “My family, including my mother, brother and father all fought for the Kurdish Resistance Movement. My brother was jailed for life for his work, until Saddam gave him an amnesty. It was in our blood to oppose these dictators. At that time we thought the best solution was to establish a democratic Kurdistan independent of Iraq. Now we believe in a federal solution - of Kurdistan being within Iraq, but autonomous.”

This shift in mindset has made this former Kurdish fighter strangely patriotic about Iraq, that odd entity cobbled together from disparate ethnic groups and lands by the British nearly a century ago. He believes in a democratic Iraq and its cultural education which he can help liberate from the mental shackles of dictatorship.

But when he started his work, Eskander’s job seemed hopeless. In the chaos after the collapse of Saddam’s regime in April 2003, arsonists set fire to the main building and looters carried off equipment. Books, journals, maps, photographs, were burned or stolen. It was a tragedy: a quarter of the collections were lost, some in their entirety; 60% of the archives disappeared too. “The library collected all types of local publications, and kept many official files and papers. As a result, it is the principal source of information on Iraqi political, social, economic and cultural life. It had been nearly totally obliterated,” says Eskander.

Where did the seized material go? “There were several groups involved in removing or stealing items from the library,” says Eskander. “The Americans, who wanted to find a link between Saddam and al-Qaida or prove the existence of weapons of mass destruction or find evidence of genocide. Professional thieves. Iraqi civilians seeking information about the fate of relatives who suffered under Saddam. Saddam loyalists who want to burn documents that would implicate them.” He also names and shames Kanan Makiya, a US-based Iraqi professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University and founder of an organisation called the Iraq Memory Foundation which has links to Bush’s neocons and rightwing think tanks. Eskander is angry that Makiya holds sensitive Iraqi documents in the US that he believes should be returned to Baghdad and housed in his library. It is estimated that between 43,000 to 55,000 boxes, amounting to more than 100m pages, were seized from Baghdad by foreign troops in April 2003. They included memos, training guides, reports, transcripts of conversations, audio- and videotapes. Most are still held by the CIA, the Pentagon and Makiya’s foundation at the Hoover Institution in Stanford University. Eskander says Iraq must get them back. “They are national Iraqi documents stolen from us. They should be here. They are essential for us to understand our recent history. Many of them are about the crimes of Saddam Hussein and they should be the property of the Iraqi people.” So far he hasn’t succeeded.

But then Eskander’s job has always been extraordinarily difficult. From his office he often sees plumes of smoke rising from car bombs; his windows regularly shudder, sometimes shatter. Today, he keeps shards of mortar bombs on his desk as souvenirs. He peppers his conversation with remarks beyond the remit of most librarians. “I’ve lost count of the bombs,” he says at one point. “They still shoot at us sometimes,” he says at another. He cuts a remarkably serene figure in his tan suit and brown shoes as I interview him in the British Library in London, where he is visiting partly to arrange the transfer of some old Iraqi maps, some dating back to the 16th century, that had been held by the India Office (the British government department that administered Iraq after the end of the first world war).

Eskander might dream of having the problems that beset the British Library, a building where there has been a recent furore about readers having to wait 20 minutes to deposit their coats and about a so-called “ frappuccino” culture of undergraduates that is besmirching the institution’s scholarly reputation. Does he worry for his own safety? After all, some armed groups in Iraq must hate what he’s doing at the library. “I never have a bodyguard,” he replies, “because that attracts attention. This idea of having bodyguards, changing cars two or three times, is very stupid. If they want to kill you, they will do it. If you are lucky you will stay, if not, you will be killed.” That is not to say he hasn’t taken precautions: the 46-year-old has moved house four times with his wife and year-old son since taking up the job.

Does he not sometimes wish that he and his family were living in London? “No. I have important work to do. I have to stay strong. Even when my staff are killed, I have to remain optimistic.” But he believes that the way he behaves professionally makes him less of a target. “In my institution I treat everybody equally. Nobody hates me.”

Until the summer of last year, Eskander wrote a blog that told the world of the grisly circumstances in which he and his staff had to work. His entry for March 5 2007, for instance, told how a huge explosion shook the library’s building; an 11.35am car bomb exploded less than 500 metres away in al-Mutanabi Street. Eskander wrote with an intellectual’s sorrow at a culture being destroyed: “The street is one of the well-known areas of Baghdad and where many publishing houses, printing companies and bookstores have their main offices and storages. Its old cafes are the most favourite place for the impoverished intellectuals, who get their inspirations and ideas from this very old quarter of Baghdad. The street is also famous for its Friday’s book market, where secondhand, new and rear books are sold and purchased.”

After the blast he wrote: “Tens of thousands of papers were flying high, as if the sky was raining books, tears and blood. The view was surreal. Some of the papers were burning in the sky. Many burning pieces of papers fell on the [library] building ... Immediately after the explosion, I ordered the guards to prevent all my staff from leaving the building, as there was a possibility of another bomb attack. My staff and I were watching the movement of a number of civilian and military ambulances, carrying killed and injured people. It was a heartbreaking view.”

Eskander’s blog, published on the British Library’s website (bl.uk/iraqdiary.html), became such an incessant chronicle of heartbreak that, in the summer of 2007, he decided to stop writing it - even though it had elicited messages of support from all over the world. “It became too emotional,” he says, “and I worried it exploited people’s suffering.”

Recently, Eskander listed the “sad notes” that have happened since he stopped writing his blog: 95 library windows smashed by a car bomb; a receptionist’s son kidnapped and murdered for “sectarian reasons”; an archivist’s son missing for five months; a library worker’s husband missing for six months.

Even in this climate, he carries on. “I want to make the library a democratic model of how Iraq should be. From the start I hired Sunnis, Kurds, Shias, women, men. The national library must be a place - perhaps even the most important place - where Iraqis from many different groups come together.” He claims to have paid special attention to women’s rights.

He takes heart from small achievements. The US embassy funded a generator. He has secured funding from Italian NGOs. Best of all, reader numbers are up from 240 a month to 900. “There is a great hunger in the Iraqi people, especially young people, for knowledge. After years when it went unsatisfied, we can satisfy it. When they come to the reading room, we study their requests, and we go to the market outside Iraq and ask for books they want.” Indeed, at Eskander’s instigation, the British Library recently made an appeal to UK universities for books on subjects in demand, especially volumes dealing with history, economics and social welfare.

But his library is not just there to help such scholars. Eskander wants to preserve the fragments of Iraq’s ancient and modern heritage in a building he calls “the historical memory of the country”. Especially the more grisly aspects of its recent heritage. “We are filming security documents from the ministry of the interior, which Iraqi people will be interested in.”

He argues, though, that the historic role of the library as a repository for government and historical documents from many periods and the central location for research into the history of the Iraqi people is being thwarted by institutions in the US. He claims that documents seized by the US military from the Ba’athist ministry of the interior, which were subsequently used to blackmail Saddam’s former secret police operatives to work for the occupation, ultimately have been transferred to the US. “These secret police archives belong in Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein’s victims and their families can study them. Even if they won’t return the original documents I know many of them have been digitised, so I am suggesting a compromise: that they give us the computer files so they can be seen in Iraq. Under international law, though, the documents should be ours, not the US government’s.”

Eskander is also campaigning against Makiya’s Iraq Memory Foundation. This private, non-profit group of rightwing Iraqi scholars earlier this year signed a deal with conservative think tank the Hoover Institution whereby seven million pages of records and other artefacts from Saddam’s tenure as Iraqi president - taken from the Ba’ath party offices and dungeons by Makiya in the aftermath of the US-led invasion in 2003 - will house the collection for the next five years at buildings in Stanford University. Makiya said recently that the documents will ultimately be returned to Iraq. “But,” he added, “Baghdad is just not ready for it.”

“The suggestion is that Baghdad is not safe,” says Eskander. “But I can assure you there are secret, secure buildings in Baghdad where these documents can be stored. It is absurd that they are in California and not in Iraq. Once the documents are returned, our policy is there will be no censorship - the Iraqi people will be able to come to my library, see all of these documents and learn. Only through complete transparency can there be true democracy in Iraq. This has to be the way forward for my country,” says Eskander, rising to his feet. He has an appointment with representatives of the British Museum and British army, and doesn’t want to be late. He’s going to advise British troops on how to help archaeological specialists from the UK who will visit major sites in southern Iraq and determine the extent of damage caused by looters. They include the museum in Basra and sites at Kut, Amara and Wasit.

It’s just the sort of initiative that Eskander loves. In it, he sees the possibility of understanding the past, valuing an ancient heritage. “This is all part of the process of coming to terms with our terrible pasts, of understanding what we have done wrong, and appreciating the glories of our history too.” At last, I think, I understand what Saad Eskander means by cultural education and why he thinks it is so important.