ANOTHER AMERICAN OCCUPATION FAILURE NOT DISCUSSED BY THE CANDIDATES: 6/8: 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
⏱️ 7 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
1963 BAGHDAD
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a series of CBSi on the world with Chai Abdul Ahad, a stranger in your own city |
| 0:10.1 | travels in the Middle East long war. It is halfway between Baghdad and |
| 0:17.2 | Mosul is a city called Ramade. We heard about it much in the Sunni |
| 0:21.0 | awakening of 2007. Well it's back |
| 0:24.0 | back except one witticism that we learn in the telling of this story is that I |
| 0:29.7 | believe when the women want to the women of the Sunni women want to make certain that |
| 0:35.2 | you're going to have a bad time, they say something like may you have many sheiks |
| 0:39.2 | in your clan or your tribe. What does that mean, Chai? Why do they say? |
| 0:43.0 | It's not only the students, but it's in every tribal society in Iraq, if women want to |
| 0:49.1 | curse a woman from another tribe, they say, may Allah increase the, you know, the tribal |
| 0:54.8 | elders in your society because the more shapes, the more tribal elders you have in a |
| 0:59.9 | tribe, the more infighting you have and every one of them will try to use outside powers to increase their influence and this is exactly what happened at Ramadi which is to the west and but that is here most of us there Ramadi is to the west and you know different |
| 1:19.4 | Sunni politicians tribal elders, forces, to, you know, some use the power of Maliki to fight others, |
| 1:29.5 | some kind of use the power of the |
| 1:35.0 | jiaites alive themselves, they're Americans. And this internal infighting between the Sunnis, I mean sometimes I call what's been happening in Iraq in the past 20 years, |
| 1:41.0 | I mean until ISIS is the tragedy of the Sunnis. |
| 1:44.3 | Because you know the Sunnis in Iraq never saw themselves as a monolithic unified force. |
| 1:50.8 | They are people of different cities, mercantile, morsel, a tribal |
| 1:55.7 | rhema d'I, rural d'Ala. The Americans came and they perceived the Sunnis |
| 2:01.2 | as a one sect and pushed them into a corner, targeted them |
| 2:05.9 | with lots of sanctions, and then they told them, go and come back with a political project. |
| 2:10.5 | Of course they couldn't. |
... |
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