ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 5/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Your-Own-City-Travels/dp/0593536886/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s vivid, shattering response. This is not a book about Iraq’s history or an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniacal leader who shaped the state in his own image; a people who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.
When the “Shock and Awe” campaign began in March 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad’s book centers on the West and in its place focuses on everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, citizens blown side
1932 BAGHDAD
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I on the World with John Bachelor. |
| 0:10.0 | Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.0 | Continuing my conversation with Krieth Abdul Ahad. |
| 0:16.8 | The new book is a stranger in your own city, |
| 0:19.4 | travels in the Middle East Long War. |
| 0:21.9 | It is the years 2011, 2012, and 2013 on the eve of much, much more |
| 0:28.9 | violence than even in that first decade following the American conquest and occupation of Baghdad and Iraq. |
| 0:37.0 | Hi, Chaih, a very good evening again to you and we begin the conversation with a high school friend of yours |
| 0:46.2 | whose name we're called Nomb de Gere is Hassan. |
| 0:49.2 | You find him sheltering in his family's home in the northern part of Baghdad behind locked doors. |
| 0:56.0 | This is a Baghdad that is unrecognizable from 15 years before. |
| 1:01.0 | It's divided into concrete blocks and also people are keeping |
| 1:06.3 | neighborhoods of Shia, Sunni, and everything in between. Hassan, what does he |
| 1:12.4 | tell you about his life and his medical degree and how he is living? |
| 1:17.0 | Good evening to you again. |
| 1:18.0 | Good evening, John. |
| 1:20.0 | I mean, Hassan was a high school friend and we used to walk from my high school into his house |
| 1:26.5 | when we ran away from school to avoid one of these spontaneous demonstrations. |
| 1:33.0 | But in, after the first phase of the civil war, |
| 1:38.0 | trying to retrace my footsteps, my route back into Hassan's house. I realize that you know the |
| 1:46.1 | neighborhoods have been divided. There are two walls now separating the high |
| 1:50.2 | school from Hassan's house and that to go into that one needs to leave one enclave, drive up and down |
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