This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchler. Here's John Batchler.

Continuing my conversation with Christ Abdul Ahad, the new book is a stranger in your

own city, travels in the Middle East long war. It is years 2011, 2012 and 2013, on the

eve of much, much more violence than even in that first decade, following the American

conquest and occupation of Baghdad and Iraq. Christ, Christ, a very good evening again to

you, and we begin the conversation with a high school friend of yours, whose name we've

got Namdaegar is Hassan. You find him sheltering in his family's home in the northern part

of Baghdad, behind locked doors. This is a Baghdad that is unrecognizable from 15 years

before. It's divided into concrete blocks and also people are keeping neighborhoods of

Shia, Suni and everything in between. Hassan, what does he tell you about his life and

his medical degree and how he is living? Good evening to you again.

Good evening, John. Hassan was a high school friend and we used to walk from my high school

into his house when we ran away from school to avoid one of these spontaneous demonstrations.

But after the first phase of the civil war, trying to retrace my footsteps, my route back

into Hassan's house, I realized that the neighborhood had been divided. There are two

walls now separating the high school from Hassan's house and that to go into that one needs to leave

one enclave, drive up and down a highway and to the second enclave to find another neighborhood.

And of course the whole geographical Baghdad had had changed by that time. I managed to

trace and I managed to find him and of course he tells this story. I mean we as journalists,

we witness the horror selectively, we go, we see a story with him, but for the people of Baghdad

and Hassan was like that, they had to live through it day by day. So he describes the time when

carbon went right in front of him, when he was stopped at the checkpoint and they asked for

...