WARNING TO JERUSALEM IN THE BATTLE OF MOSUL: 1/8: 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
🗓️ 28 October 2023
⏱️ 9 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.
1900 Baghdad
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bachelor. Here's John Bachelor. |
| 0:12.7 | It is April 2003, Baghdad, the spring of 2003. |
| 0:20.8 | Raith Abdul Ahad is in Baghdad and his new book, A Stranger in Your Own City, Travels in |
| 0:27.3 | the Middle East Long War, record from that moment the entry of the Americans into the |
| 0:33.4 | tragedy and mystery of Iraq in the 20th century and before. |
| 0:39.8 | Raith, congratulations and good evening. You are in Baghdad observing these moments before |
| 0:45.9 | the American armor column arrives. And at some point you see a gathering of American |
| 0:52.5 | soldiers and Iraqis, Baghdad citizens around a statue of Saddam Hussein and from the |
| 0:59.1 | Meridian and Sheraton Hotel, I'm following your reporting. What do you observe and what |
| 1:04.6 | does it tell you now all these years later about the American presentation to the citizens |
| 1:11.4 | of Iraq? Good evening to you. Good evening. I mean, you know, it's the most important |
| 1:17.0 | image is the image that keep repeating itself again and again on TV as if it's that image |
| 1:22.2 | to justify all that came after. I stood there. I saw an American marine units. I followed |
| 1:30.2 | them. I stood in the square and I saw these a few Iraqis who tried to topple the statue |
| 1:36.9 | and and you know, I have to say the crowd of journalists gathered around the statue, which |
| 1:42.2 | much larger, much bigger than the Iraqis themselves. And of course, all what you see on TV cameras |
| 1:48.9 | is is a group of Iraqis, but if you expand the lens a bit, if you stand on the other side, |
| 1:54.1 | you would see a much larger group of journalists, foreign journalists gathered around the statue |
| 1:58.9 | waiting for the statue to be toppled. And and of course, eventually the the Marines kind of |
| 2:06.4 | bring one of the big kind of trucks and one of these armored vehicles and put the news around |
| 2:12.7 | the statue and pull down the statue. And that's the image that plays again and again on TV. |
| 2:20.1 | It's the image. It's the moment I personally thought that this regime was over, |
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