RANSACKED AND ABANDONEDED IRAQ: 4/8: 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
🗓️ 4 September 2023
⏱️ 8 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 sideways through life by the war, and the proliferation of sectarian battles that continue to this day. Here is their Iraq, seen from the inside: the human cost of violence, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.
PHOTO:
1918 Baghdad
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Matt Ford and I'm Alice Levine and we're the presenters of British Scandal. |
| 0:04.8 | People do strange things, don't they Alice? |
| 0:06.9 | I don't like the tone of your voice, what do you mean? |
| 0:10.0 | On our didn't mean you, I'm at the entire British public who in 2022 |
| 0:14.3 | followed a live stream of a lettuce with a wig on. |
| 0:17.5 | Entirely normal behaviour. |
| 0:19.2 | There's more normal than what was going on inside Downing Street. |
| 0:21.5 | For this series on British Scandal we're taking you inside number 10, |
| 0:24.6 | covering the shocking and very short premiership of Liz Truss. |
| 0:27.8 | Listen to British Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:35.1 | This is CPSI in the world, I'm John Batsworth, the author, |
| 0:38.7 | Ray Th Abdelahad, he's also the journalist, Ray Th Abdelahad. |
| 0:43.7 | His new book is A Stranger in Your Own City. |
| 0:46.4 | Travels in the Middle East Long War. |
| 0:49.1 | Ray Th Abdelahad, I learned from you that you saw Saddam Hussein, the leader of necessity. |
| 0:54.0 | Twice, once as a youth and again in the trial. |
| 0:58.4 | What struck you as the change that you observed in him when he entered the courtroom? |
| 1:05.0 | So John, as I said, I grew up in the shadow of Saddam and for me when I was a child |
| 1:09.6 | he was something like, you know, bigger than God in our lives. |
| 1:13.2 | And I remember when I was a child seeing him on top of a Mercedes car waving to the car. |
| 1:18.4 | The second time when I saw him was this frail old man white beard entering the courtroom. |
| 1:27.0 | And that quote, that trial of Saddam Hussein, it could have been another point |
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