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Times reports on colonel who lured women he met via web


MSNBC

June 11 — While Col. Kassem Saleh was stationed in Afghanistan, he had plenty of support from back home. He could count on emails, letters and phone calls from his women — more than 50 fiancées who he met through Internet dating services. Now these women, recently clued in to his “chronic courting,” want the Army to take action, according to a report in Wednesday’s New York Times.

‘He wrote better than Yeats. He wrote better than Shakespeare. He totally intoxicated you with his feelings: “Oh, baby, I want to tell you how much I miss you.” “I can’t wait to get home to you.’”

One of Saleh's fiancee — ROBIN SOLOD FOR YEARS, according to some of the women, Saleh met women through Web sites like tallpersonals.com, match.com and christiansingles.com. What ensued were flowery emails, letters and satellite telephone calls from his bases in Afghanistan.
“He wrote better than Yeats. He wrote better than Shakespeare. He totally intoxicated you with his feelings: ‘Oh, baby, I want to tell you how much I miss you.’ ‘I can’t wait to get home to you,’ ” Robin Solod, 43, told the Times.
A member of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., Col. Saleh headed reconstruction and humanitarian efforts for the U.S.-led military operations in Afghanistan, Army spokesman Col. Roger King, told the Times.
The women want the Army to punish Saleh and according to King, the Army is investigating the matter, the Times reported.
His scheme fell apart this spring when a local Washington television station broadcast a story about a woman who was engaged to Saleh. MSNBC.com’s local news Web site picked up the story and other women who thought they were Saleh’s betrothed called the television station.

Solod read the news story on the Internet and tracked down Saleh’s “fiancée” in Washington despite his denials that he and the woman were “just friends.” Solod discovered that the two were indeed involved, an exposure that has deeply hurt the many women who thought they were soon headed down the aisle, according to the report.
According to some of the women, not even the sappy emails were unique. Saleh would reuse emails he received from his women and forward them to many others.
In one e-mail message that the New York Times said Solod supplied, he wrote: “You are my world, my life, my love and my universe. It’s like my mother used to say to me in Arabic when I was a little boy. Yi Yunni (my eyes), Ya hyyetti (my love), Ya elbee (my heart), and Ya umree (my life). She used to sing it to me so I would fall asleep in our one-bedroom apartment in the slums of Brooklyn.”
“We are not a group of stupid, naïve women,” Sarah Calder, 33, told the Times. “We are bright, intellectual, professional women. I can’t tell you how much he wooed us with his words. He made us feel like goddesses, fairy princesses, Cinderellas. We had all found our Superman, our knight in shining armor.”