WARNING TO JERUSALEM IN THE BATTLE OF MOSUL: 2/8: 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.
1920 Baghdad
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI In The World. I'm John Batser. I'm with the author and journalist. |
| 0:09.6 | Ray Thabdala-Hard is no book as a stranger in your own city, travels in the Middle East |
| 0:15.2 | long war. Ray Thu paint a beautiful scene of your father and showing you in the high |
| 0:22.4 | and sky over Baghdad in F4 Phantom. Who was your father at that moment? What did he make |
| 0:28.5 | of the F4 Phantom for the I believe you were five years old? I was five. My father was a what do |
| 0:36.7 | we call an amateur interested in aviation and planes and collected all these you know |
| 0:43.6 | forum magazines about airplanes and jet fighters. He had a few friends who were pilots and the |
| 0:48.9 | Air Force. So this is where he could you know spot the F4 flying over Baghdad. I really remember |
| 0:58.0 | that day as my first war. I went to my parents' bedroom my father later took me to the roof |
| 1:04.4 | seeing that was the first time I hear the sounds of heavy anti-aircraft machine guns and it's |
| 1:12.2 | a very interesting point because you know John because I think that's the point where all the |
| 1:17.7 | miseries of Al-Ab started that war with Iran which led to Saddam having a very strong army |
| 1:25.2 | but a but a bankrupt country which led him to invading Kuwait in 91 and the history with |
| 1:33.2 | the rest. The story includes you witnessing a parade. My date says 1989 so you were a few years |
| 1:41.4 | older a parade a victory parade though the war ended with no clear winner both sides as we |
| 1:49.6 | witness in all wars both sides extremely greets dricken but at the same time claiming success |
| 1:57.2 | you witness a parade where there are Iranian prisoners and Iraqi soldiers I picture the parade |
| 2:03.1 | marching by and you get close enough for one soldier to give you a bullet what did you make of that |
| 2:10.0 | when you excited was everybody excited about that parade. So the parade was before the end of the |
| 2:17.2 | war I mean of course there was massive parades after the end of the war and as you say both sides |
| 2:21.7 | claimed that they came victorious that specific parade I think was around 86 and I was still young |
| 2:28.1 | and and again I remember my father kind of like lifting me to look at the trucks and the |
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