WARNING TO JERUSALEM IN THE BATTLE OF MOSUL: 7/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

WARNING TO JERUSALEM IN THE BATTLE OF MOSUL: 7/8: A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

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.

1902 Baghdad

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm sorry, I get used to the I get excited in the conversation. I forget what time it is. I can handle that.
0:16.0	20 minutes to go. You're wonderful. Thank you.
0:21.0	Thank you. Thank you, John. I love the conversation.
0:24.0	On the muscle and we're going to leave the the redemption for October 2019 in the fourth segment. Okay.
0:33.0	Yes.
0:34.0	Five.
0:36.0	Leave them redeemed. Hi, that's my secret.
0:41.0	No matter what part of history find it. Five.
0:47.0	Four, three, two, one.
0:50.0	I'm John Bachelor with Christ, Abdul Ahad, a stranger in your own city is his new book, Travels in the Middle East Long War.
0:58.0	The Iranians are on the battlefield. The Islamic State is now dominating Mosul.
1:06.0	Islamic State has established itself as a caliphate.
1:12.0	What that means for the rest of Iraq is power in the northern part of Iraq and Mosul and doubts about the Shia dominated regime in Baghdad.
1:23.0	The Iranians are present to help recapture cities such as Ramadi and Fallujah from the Islamic State.
1:32.0	The reason the Islamic State get so much attention these days still is that they practiced horrors.
1:40.0	Now at some point there was a recognition by the jihadis that we did it wrong the first time that we alienated the people buying brutal and cruel.
1:49.0	We executed not only the person but his cousin and his cousin's cousin.
1:53.0	We're not going to do that anymore.
1:55.0	Was that something the ISIS people forgot or didn't practice?
1:59.0	Because the Spiker massacre that you explicate very carefully the mass slaughter of 1700 or more recruits by ISIS authorities suggests that they didn't follow their own recommendation to be generous.
2:13.0	I mean of course they can't see what they do is they always talk about oh you know so all these kind of movements militant movements they would say oh in our previous attempts we committed so much horrors the next time we will not do it.
2:28.0	And of course in Mosul the people of Mosul believed that you know again delusionly they think so it's like all these new outfits who behave better than before.
	...

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