THE man in the red jacket, clutching a microphone and talking about the situation in Iraq, is familiar enough. The setting is not. We're used to seeing Rageh Omaar reporting from the roof of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad as US shells whizz past. Here, he's speaking in the relative calm of Borders bookshop in York to an audience of several hundred people.

The risk of the odd unfriendly question is possible, but he knows this isn't a hostile audience. They've come to see the former BBC correspondent dubbed the Scud Stud and who emerged as the "star" from the Press pack covering the Iraq War from the inside.

The woman from local radio who introduces him to the audience recalls how T-shirts with his face on were printed - and I bet he wished she hadn't. The Somalian-born reporter wants to be known for his work not his face. He needs to put his head above the parapet to publicise his first book, Revolution Day, while aware that this will only add to his celebrity status.

It's a price he's prepared to pay, up to a point. He's aware that people can be feted for how they look rather than what they do. "That's the side of celebrity that's always worried me, but the power to influence that is in your hands," he says, over a glass of wine before entering the book-signing war zone.

"In terms of the publicity, that whole celebrity thing was something I was very careful to avoid. I want to support the book and I am doing publicity. But we are talking about Iraq. I've had virtually zero questions about personal things.

"I've had questions from people of 80 and a girl of 11. They want to know what's happening in Iraq, why it's a mess. They're asking very sophisticated questions." Indeed, the first one in York is not about the red jacket that became his trademark in his BBC reports but about whether he'd ever met Saddam Hussein (no, is the answer).

Omaar has been working in TV long enough to know how the cult of personality can take over and is determined not to let it in his case. This must be difficult when even a serious broadsheet like The Guardian describes you as "a bit of a babe".

FOR the record, he's 36 and married with two young children. Born in Mogadishu, he came to the UK with his family when he was six. After attending Cheltenham Boys College and Oxford University, his journalistic career began in the BBC World Service in Africa.

He had been covering events in Iraq for six years for the BBC, and his knowledge of and closeness to the people made him determined to write a book that wasn't just an account of the war that made him famous. After a bidding war, he signed a two-book deal with Penguin. Revolution Day will be followed by a book about his homeland of Somalia.

Omaar has been accused of being diffident and refusing to take sides over the Iraq War. He certainly weighs up every word. "I knew instinctively from the word go the kind of book I wanted to write," he says. "I speak Arabic and have been going to Iraq for six years. Professional pride and intellectual vanity could make me write a book that other experts would doff their caps at. That flashed across my mind. But the thing I wanted to write was the human story."

That's reflected in the sub-title of Revolution Day - The Human Story Of The Battle For Iraq. "I try and give a small glimpse, to lift the lid and peel back the face of the ordinary Iraqi that I have known and become very good friends with. To tell the story of the country from the human perspective. I know some people say, 'he's thrown his chance away and could have written a really serious book on the subject'."

As he travels on his book tour, he's finding that a nation supposedly having little interest in foreign affairs does, in fact, want to discuss Iraq. "They want to talk about the country and the people we fought to liberate. I want as many people as possible to see Iraq beyond those images of a guy with a moustache and beret," he says.

There is a deep sense, he feels, that people don't know what to believe. Omaar is not about to tell them, which has led to criticism of his reluctance to go into the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq. "I'm a working journalist and need to be strong and say the truth, and be confident as I say it. You must not shirk from that," he says.

"I don't want people to say that in this book, Rageh Omaar takes sides because that's how you lose people's opinion. Comment is there but, in a way, I hope it takes people by the hand. I don't want to ram my opinions on them. If I do, I'm in trouble. I try to tell it straight."

One thing that endeared him to viewers was his conversational style and a certain vulnerability. He was amazed when, post-war, someone asked him if it had taken him a long time to work on that style. "That's just me," he protests.

While obviously pleased to be back home with his family and life away from the firing line, he misses friends and colleagues who worked with him in Iraq.

HE'S no longer a BBC man, having gone freelance. This will enable him to vary his work, making films and writing books as well as reporting. He's returning to Baghdad shortly "to report and make films and write more on it".

He speaks daily to friends in Baghdad and Afghanistan. He knows about post-conflict daily life in Baghdad through Mohammed, part of his Iraq team and a manager in the BBC office in the capital. Coincidentally, Mohammed studied at the University of York, translating James Joyce's work into Arabic, before joining the BBC.

He tells Omaar that the city is affected by lawlessness and a wave of kidnapping of children, for ransom or prostitution. They have satellite dishes, but not a feeling of safety under the occupation.

It's the closest he gets to expressing an opinion, and echoes his feelings as he left Baghdad when the war ended. "One day the city fell and the statue came bouncing down, the next day the looting began," he recalls. "We were accused of over-bland pessimism. The day I drove out of Baghdad, I was not optimistic."

It is the human stories that sum up the war for Omaar. He tells his York audience, as he'd told me beforehand, of meeting a famous Iraqi singer after the bombing of the Ministry of Information, opposite the apartment block where she lived. "She kept saying, 'I love England, but can't understand why the country I love is doing this to me'," he recalls.

"She spoke with the kind of tone of a rejected lover. She couldn't understand why something she loved so much was doing this to her. A lot of Iraqis love England and ask, 'why are you doing this?, ten years of sanctions and now this'. Has the occupation made anything different for her? These are the kind of voices I have tried to capture."

* Revolution Day: The Human Story Of The Battle For Iraq is published in Viking hardback, price £17.99.