Baghdad Burning

[Al-khiyal]

Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq



Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq

She arrived online on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2003, a little more than four months after Baghdad was occupied by American troops. "So this is the beginning for me, I guess," was her first sentence. "I never thought I'd start my own weblog ... I'm female, Iraqi, and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway." Reading that passage over now still gives me a little chill.

She took the pseudonym Riverbend and called her blog Baghdad Burning. We learned more about her over the years. Like many Iraqi women, she had worked - as a computer programmer, a self-styled "geek" - but she lost her job after the American occupation amid growing hostility toward working women. She said was a Sunni who believed in God, but she avoided wearing a head scarf and clung to the hope that Iraqis would not make religious affiliations their identity. Although she spent some of her youth living abroad, she now resided in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood with her parents and beloved younger brother "E" (who would later carry a pistol for protection), in a world that was slowly, slowly slipping away.

We knew, from a rare e-interview she did with Lakshmi Chaudhry at alternet.org, that she started her "girlblog from Iraq" at the suggestion of Salam Pax, a well known male Iraqi blogger, and wrote it in English - stunning, American-style English - because she didn't want to "preach to the choir" in Arabic. We learned a little about her life as a young reader (Jane Austen to John le Carré) and about the limitations her parents put on her TV watching as a child. Bits and pieces slipped out. But, in the end, she was generally as good as her word. Signing off on each post as "river," she offered remarkably little more in the way of biographical information - but so unimaginably much more about everything else.

About what it felt like over several years to have the lights of civilization literally blink off; about how it felt to lose the things city dwellers normally take for granted: running water (and hence the ability to bathe or wash your clothes), electricity (and so the ability to turn on the air conditioning in 120-degree heat or even post the blog entry you just wrote), the telephone (and so the ability to speak to friends and relatives, especially as your house became something close to your prison). She taught us what it was like to retreat to the roof in the heat of the evening and watch the explosions going off in your own city; what it was like to become an expert in telling one kind of weapons fire from another.

It took Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks until this year to produce his best-seller "Fiasco." Riverbend has produced her version of fiasco on the fly. If you read her online, you generally learned about the disasters of the moment first there, not in our newspapers: the first deaths of those she knew; the first brutal, humiliating U.S. house searches and arrests of neighbors; the first kidnappings; the first mentions of the rise of fundamentalism; the first signs of an incipient civil war and ethnic cleansing campaign; the first mention of horrors at Abu Ghraib prison; the first suicide bombs and car bombs; on and on. On the fiasco of Paul Bremer, then our viceroy in Baghdad, disbanding the Iraqi army, she wrote on Aug. 24, 2003: "The first major decision (Bremer) made was to dissolve the Iraqi army. That may make sense in Washington, but here, we were left speechless."

Hers were often the quietest of descriptions - of the comings and goings inside a single house, but they were also war reports. As the explosions and chaos crept ever closer, as they morphed into the familiar wallpaper of her life, she became, even inside her own home, a war correspondent on the front lines. ("When Bush 'brought the war to the terrorists,' he failed to mention he wouldn't be fighting it in some distant mountains or barren deserts: the front line is our homes ... the 'collateral damage' are our friends and families.")

Her blog entries, gathered into two books, "Baghdad Burning, Girl Blog from Iraq," and more recently "Baghdad Burning II, More Girl Blog from Iraq," add up to the best account we have of what it has been like to live through the American "liberation" of Iraq - and, although it's a surprising thing to say given the grimness of her subject matter, her work was beautiful to read because she wrote her English like an angel.

I'm a 62-year-old book editor, so it's not unknown for me to fall in love with someone through their words, and I now realize that, when it came to Riverbend, I did so.

Then, on Aug. 5 of this year, she posted a blog entry eerily entitled "Summer of Goodbyes," which began: "Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city. Some families are waking up to find a Kalashnikov bullet and a letter in an envelope with the words, 'Leave your area or else.' " Telling us that she no longer dared go out without wearing a hijab, she signed off this way: "I sometimes wonder if we'll ever know just how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis left the country this bleak summer. I wonder how many of them will actually return. Where will they go? What will they do with themselves? Is it time to follow? Is it time to wash our hands of the country and try to find a stable life somewhere else?"

And then she blogged no more.

Those of us who regularly read her waited. This fierce yet gentle young woman - whose blog had links to both Iraq Body Count and Dilbert, Iraq Occupation Watch and the Onion - had been gone before, the first time in early September 2003 ("I haven't been writing these last few days because I simply haven't felt inspired") and once for a month and a half. Sometimes family crises, simple lack of electricity, or the heat kept her away; sometimes, clearly, it was depression and perhaps a sense of her own insignificance given the magnitude of the catastrophe happening around her. ("The war was brought to us here, and now we have to watch the country disintegrate before our very eyes.")

As time passed and nothing appeared, readers began writing in, asking whether I knew anything about her fate. No, I knew nothing. I had written her a couple of times and once even gotten a one-line e-mail back, so I went to her site and wrote again. No answer, no entries. More days, then weeks passed. Two months passed, and I found myself at odd moments wondering whether she had been among the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who had fled the country. Or had she, like the neighbors down the street, been taken in a U.S. raid and imprisoned, or like one of her relatives kidnapped, or had she even ... and here I would hesitate ... become victim 655,001? And would we ever find out?

How can you care for someone you don't know? What does that caring even mean? I'm honestly not sure. But I found I did care in a way that was impossible when it came to Iraqis en masse, no matter that my own country, the place where I grew up and to which I'm deeply and undeniably attached, has been so central to those hundreds of thousands of wasted lives and all the other ones to come.

I called Riverbend's publisher, the Feminist Press at City University of New York, and talked to a couple of worried souls there. They, too, had heard nothing. Finally, I had decided to do something about her absence - the one small thing I could actually do, write a dispatch at my Web site - when on Oct. 18, I started getting e-mails that she had just blogged, that she was back. She had written a new entry on the recent Lancet casualty study, which offered the 655,000 figure as the most likely number of "excess" Iraqi deaths since the start of the war.

In it, she admitted that she had stopped writing, in part, due to "a certain hopelessness that can't be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also."

On the Lancet figures themselves, she found nothing strange. ("There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.") Nor was she surprised that American war supporters were not about to embrace the study's figures: "Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or a magnitude-9 earthquake, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower ... oh wait - that one actually happened."

So amid the carnage, Riverbend has returned to us, though only once thus far. Given the world she inhabits, once already seems like a small miracle.

Words from the heart of Baghdad

[Al-khiyal]

Riverbend's blog: Baghdad Burning

[Cheba_Mami]

She is a good writer. The world will remeber, and realise the effect of the war on normal people which have nothing to do with the governmnet.

[Al-khiyal]

You know your country is in trouble when:

1 - The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.

2 - Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.

3 - The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.

4 - The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.

5 - An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country's 'Golden Years'.

6 - Your country is purportedly 'selling' 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.

7 - For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it's going to cut back on providing that hour.

8 - Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is 'sectarian bloodshed' or 'civil war'.

9 - People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that's been missing for two weeks.

A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.

2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No - really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It's like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart - a chip here, a chunk there.

That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible- from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaafari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.

The question now is, but why? I really have been asking myself that these last few days. What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent? I'm certain only raving idiots still believe this war and occupation were about WMD or an actual fear of Saddam.

Al Qaeda? That's laughable. Bush has effectively created more terrorists in Iraq these last 4 years than Osama could have created in 10 different terrorist camps in the distant hills of Afghanistan. Our children now play games of 'sniper' and 'jihadi', pretending that one hit an American soldier between the eyes and this one overturned a Humvee.

This last year especially has been a turning point. Nearly every Iraqi has lost so much. So much. There's no way to describe the loss we've experienced with this war and occupation. There are no words to relay the feelings that come with the knowledge that daily almost 40 corpses are found in different states of decay and mutilation. There is no compensation for the dense, black cloud of fear that hangs over the head of every Iraqi. Fear of things so out of ones hands, it borders on the ridiculous - like whether your name is 'too Sunni' or 'too Shia'. Fear of the larger things - like the Americans in the tank, the police patrolling your area in black bandanas and green banners, and the Iraqi soldiers wearing black masks at the checkpoint.

Again, I can't help but ask myself why this was all done? What was the point of breaking Iraq so that it was beyond repair? Iran seems to be the only gainer. Their presence in Iraq is so well-established, publicly criticizing a cleric or ayatollah verges on suicide. Has the situation gone so beyond America that it is now irretrievable? Or was this a part of the plan all along? My head aches just posing the questions.

What has me most puzzled right now is: why add fuel to the fire? Sunnis and moderate Shia are being chased out of the larger cities in the south and the capital. Baghdad is being torn apart with Shia leaving Sunni areas and Sunnis leaving Shia areas- some under threat and some in fear of attacks. People are being openly shot at check points or in drive by killings… Many colleges have stopped classes. Thousands of Iraqis no longer send their children to school - it's just not safe.

Why make things worse by insisting on Saddam's execution now? Who gains if they hang Saddam? Iran, naturally, but who else? There is a real fear that this execution will be the final blow that will shatter Iraq. Some Sunni and Shia tribes have threatened to arm their members against the Americans if Saddam is executed. Iraqis in general are watching closely to see what happens next, and quietly preparing for the worst.

This is because now, Saddam no longer represents himself or his regime. Through the constant insistence of American war propaganda, Saddam is now representative of all Sunni Arabs (never mind most of his government were Shia). The Americans, through their speeches and news articles and Iraqi Puppets, have made it very clear that they consider him to personify Sunni Arab resistance to the occupation. Basically, with this execution, what the Americans are saying is "Look- Sunni Arabs- this is your man, we all know this. We're hanging him- he symbolizes you." And make no mistake about it, this trial and verdict and execution are 100% American. Some of the actors were Iraqi enough, but the production, direction and montage was pure Hollywood (though low-budget, if you ask me).

That is, of course, why Talbani doesn't want to sign his death penalty - not because the mob man suddenly grew a conscience, but because he doesn't want to be the one who does the hanging - he won't be able to travel far away enough if he does that.

Maliki's government couldn't contain their glee. They announced the ratification of the execution order before the actual court did. A few nights ago, some American news program interviewed Maliki's bureau chief, Basim Al-Hassani who was speaking in accented American English about the upcoming execution like it was a carnival he'd be attending. He sat, looking sleazy and not a little bit ridiculous, his dialogue interspersed with 'gonna', 'gotta' and 'wanna'... Which happens, I suppose, when the only people you mix with are American soldiers.

My only conclusion is that the Americans want to withdraw from Iraq, but would like to leave behind a full-fledged civil war because it wouldn't look good if they withdraw and things actually begin to improve, would it?

Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.

Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn't believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.

Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so.

Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn't make them more significant, does it?

End of another year

[Al-khiyal]

"On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea - leaving one's home and extended family - leaving one's country - and to what? To where?"

The Great Wall of Segregation...

…Which is the wall the current Iraqi government is building (with the support and guidance of the Americans). It's a wall that is intended to separate and isolate what is now considered the largest 'Sunni' area in Baghdad- let no one say the Americans are not building anything. According to plans the Iraqi puppets and Americans cooked up, it will 'protect' A'adhamiya, a residential/mercantile area that the current Iraqi government and their death squads couldn't empty of Sunnis.

The wall, of course, will protect no one. I sometimes wonder if this is how the concentration camps began in Europe. The Nazi government probably said, "Oh look- we're just going to protect the Jews with this little wall here- it will be difficult for people to get into their special area to hurt them!" And yet, it will also be difficult to get out.

The Wall is the latest effort to further break Iraqi society apart. Promoting and supporting civil war isn't enough, apparently- Iraqis have generally proven to be more tenacious and tolerant than their mullahs, ayatollahs, and Vichy leaders. It's time for America to physically divide and conquer- like Berlin before the wall came down or Palestine today. This way, they can continue chasing Sunnis out of "Shia areas" and Shia out of "Sunni areas".

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq's history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven't been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.

I remember Baghdad before the war- one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were- we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea - leaving one's home and extended family - leaving one's country - and to what? To where?

Since last summer, we had been discussing it more and more. It was only a matter of time before what began as a suggestion- a last case scenario- soon took on solidity and developed into a plan. For the last couple of months, it has only been a matter of logistics. Plane or car? Jordan or Syria? Will we all leave together as a family? Or will it be only my brother and I at first?

After Jordan or Syria- where then? Obviously, either of those countries is going to be a transit to something else. They are both overflowing with Iraqi refugees, and every single Iraqi living in either country is complaining of the fact that work is difficult to come by, and getting a residency is even more difficult. There is also the little problem of being turned back at the border. Thousands of Iraqis aren't being let into Syria or Jordan - and there are no definite criteria for entry, the decision is based on the whim of the border patrol guard checking your passport.

An airplane isn't necessarily safer, as the trip to Baghdad International Airport is in itself risky and travelers are just as likely to be refused permission to enter the country (Syria and Jordan) if they arrive by airplane. And if you're wondering why Syria or Jordan, because they are the only two countries that will let Iraqis in without a visa. Following up visa issues with the few functioning embassies or consulates in Baghdad is next to impossible.

So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees - the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare - stay and wait and try to survive.

On the one hand, I know that leaving the country and starting a new life somewhere else - as yet unknown - is such a huge thing that it should dwarf every trivial concern. The funny thing is that it’s the trivial that seems to occupy our lives. We discuss whether to take photo albums or leave them behind. Can I bring along a stuffed animal I've had since the age of four? Is there room for E.'s guitar? What clothes do we take? Summer clothes? The winter clothes too? What about my books? What about the CDs, the baby pictures?

The problem is that we don't even know if we'll ever see this stuff again. We don't know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends… And to what?

It's difficult to decide which is more frightening - car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.

Riverbend: Leaving Iraq

[Al-khiyal]

Leaving Home...

[Bent_Bladi]

The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

deep.......