Listening to Iraq

Ann Friedman:

Listening to Iraq: The news outlets that still report from Iraq rarely publish accounts of daily life there. Rarer still are narratives from outside the confines of the Green Zone. Sure, we get snippets of information from Iraqi reporters working with Western journalists, but most of the time, Iraqis' voices come to us in the form of react-quotes after a marketplace bombing or sectarian uprising. We don't see what it's like for Iraqis to walk home from the scene of the violence, then make dinner, then put their kids to bed. We lack the humanizing power of detail....

Blogs used to fill some of this void. Widely read Iraqi bloggers like Riverbend, the 26-year-old pseudonymous woman who wrote a daily account of life in Baghdad, and Raed Jarrar, whose entire family blogged the first three years of the occupation, gave international readers important insights into the real impact of the war -- in the form of long, winding narratives, not fleeting quotes.

But between 2006 and 2007, almost all of those bloggers, Riverbend included, left Iraq out of fear for their safety.... When I asked Zangana which English-language Iraqi blogs are still active and written from Iraq, the only one she could name (though there are probably more) was A Star from Mosul. In it, a 20-year-old engineering student writes under the pseudonym "Najma" about her stress-inducing course load, drama with her friends, and her adorable niece and nephew. Intertwined with those details, she writes about how the war has intruded on her daily life.... Najma doesn't identify her classmate as Sunni or Shiite or pigeonhole him in any way. He is a young man who used to laugh and is now depressed. And while Najma has also written about U.S. soldiers searching her house and assassination attempts on her university campus, the most striking thing about her blog is how quietly sad many of its details are...

And, of course, why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Except, also of course, for McClatchy: Inside Iraq: http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/iraq/

Comments

[anne]

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/iraq/000791.php

April 14, 2008

Five Years On, Fallujah in Tatters
By Ali al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail

FALLUJAH - Fallujah remains a crippled city more than two years after the November 2004 U.S.-led assault.

Unemployment, and lack of medical care and safe drinking water in the city 60 km west of Baghdad remain a continuous problem. Freedom of movement is still curtailed.

The city suffered two devastating U.S. military attacks during 2004. Many of the buildings were destroyed, or heavily damaged. Several collapsed under the heavy bombing, and were never rebuilt. The heaps of concrete slabs and piles of rubble remain where they were.

"We wonder why we have been targeted by Americans since the first days of the occupation," Dr. Mohammad Abed from al-Anbar University told IPS. "This city sacrificed thousands of its citizens through five years of occupation just because they said 'no' to a project that threatens their country's future."

Now a less visible form of destruction is being spread, he said. "The new wave of destruction is represented by tearing the social tissue apart. The Americans are paying tremendous amounts of money to get people of Fallujah to fight each other."

The road into Fallujah from the main Amman-Baghdad highway is safer today, but nobody is allowed into Fallujah who is not from the city and can prove it by providing elaborate identity documentation. That can only be obtained by undergoing biometric identification by the U.S. military -- a process which includes retina scans, body searches and finger-printing before issuance of a bar-coded ID badge.

The city remains sealed. Many residents refer to it as a big jail.

"Being sealed for five years, Fallujah has lost all aspects of natural life," Ahmad Hamid, a former member of the city council told IPS. "A man who has lived most of his life mixing with British and American people told us in 2003 that we could not reach any agreement because they (Americans) look at Fallujah as a centre of Iraqi people's unity. He told us Iraq would be divided into regions, provinces and even tribes, but we in the council did not listen to him."

The city remains tense in the face of power struggles and turf wars between tribal chiefs and Awakening group commanders, in Fallujah and in other areas of the volatile al-Anbar province. Disputes between the Iraqi Islamic Party and Awakening groups are also creating security tensions. The Awakening forces are former resistance fighters that the U.S. pays to be now on its side.

Beyond security, the health situation in the city is particularly difficult. A study conducted by two civil society organisations and the administration of Fallujah General Hospital over a two-year period was submitted to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees on Mar. 4.

The hospital administration and the two groups, the Conservation Centre of Environment and Reserves in Fallujah and the Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq, say that in 2006 they found "5,928 new illness cases that were unknown before in Fallujah," over 70 percent of which were "cancers and abnormalities" in children below 12 years of age....

[There are hundreds of dispatches from Iraq from Dahr Jamail and colleagues - http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/ .]

[anne]

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/iraq/000712.php

December 27, 2007

Saddam Provided More Food Than the U.S.
By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail

BAQUBA - The Iraqi government announcement that monthly food rations will be cut by half has left many Iraqis asking how they can survive.

The government also wants to reduce the number of people depending on the rationing system by five million by June 2008.

Iraq's food rations system was introduced by the Saddam Hussein government in 1991 in response to the UN economic sanctions. Families were allotted basic foodstuffs monthly because the Iraqi Dinar and the economy collapsed.

The sanctions, imposed after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, were described as "genocidal" by Denis Halliday, then UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Halliday quit his post in protest against the U.S.-backed sanctions.

The sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, and as many adults, according to the UN. They brought malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicines. Iraqis became nearly completely reliant on food rations for survival. The programme has continued into the U.S.-led occupation.

But now the U.S.-backed Iraqi government has announced it will halve the essential items in the ration because of "insufficient funds and spiralling inflation."

The cuts, which are to be introduced in the beginning of 2008, have drawn widespread criticism. The Iraqi government is unable to supply the rations with several billion dollars at its disposal, whereas Saddam Hussein was able to maintain the programme with less than a billion dollars.

"In 2007, we asked for 3.2 billion dollars for rationing basic foodstuffs," Mohammed Hanoun, Iraq's chief of staff for the ministry of trade told al-Jazeera. "But since the prices of imported foodstuff doubled in the past year, we requested 7.2 billion dollars for this year. That request was denied."

The trade ministry is now preparing to slash the list of subsidised items by half to five basic food items, "namely flour, sugar, rice, oil, and infant milk," Hanoun said.

The imminent move will affect nearly 10 million people who depend on the rationing system. But it has already caused outrage in Baquba, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.

"The monthly food ration was the only help from the government," local grocer Ibrahim al-Ageely told IPS. "It was of great benefit for the families. The food ration consisted of two kilos of rice, sugar, soap, tea, detergent, wheat flour, lentils, chick-peas, and other items for every individual."

Another grocer said the food ration was the "life of all Iraqis; every month, Iraqis wait in queues to receive their food rations."

According to an Oxfam International report released in July this year, "60 percent (of Iraqis) currently have access to rations through the government-run Public Distribution System (PDS), down from 96 percent in 2004."

The report said that "43 percent of Iraqis suffer from absolute poverty," and that according to some estimates over half the population are now without work. "Children are hit the hardest by the decline in living standards. Child malnutrition rates have risen from 19 percent before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 to 28 percent now." ...

[Roland]

One good blog is:

www.last-of-iraqis.blogspot.com

It's written by an Iraqi dentist living in Baghdad (and definitely not in the Green Zone).

He has twice tried to flee to Jordan, but their regulations have changed, and he was rejected.

[mike]

Iraq Today has a few Iraq blogs listed on their home page, and their daily roundup of events is excellent.

http://warnewstoday.blogspot.com/index.html

I particularly recommend A Family in Baghdad:

http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately, none of the family is in Baghdad, or even Iraq, anymore. On her latest post she notes why she and probably most Iraqi bloggers no longer bother:

"Keeping a diary is no longer one of the daily rituals of my life, like it was while we lived in Baghdad… or even after I left Baghdad to Jordan in 2005.
I don't know; perhaps because of the big amount of calamities I witnessed among the Iraqis here, or listening to the silly news from inside Iraq everyday; all these things made me feel tedious from writing, with an increased conviction that helping people is the best way to create the positive change on the ground, instead of wasting the time in talking and empty dispute….."

[Fred]

For several years, Michael Totten has done reporting on the web from Iraq and the Middle East:
http://www.michaeltotten.com/

Focusing on the military, Michael Yon has been reporting regularly:
http://michaelyon-online.com/

Neither of these guys are Iraqis. Most Iraqis don't blog in English.

And there's Iraq the Model:
http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

And that figure of half a million Iraqi children starved to death is a forgery. If that many died there would have been another million or two nearly starved, with swollen bellies, lining the roads, filling the TV screens, and on and on...