A Stranger in Your Own City

Reviews

An excellent and haunting account of the impact of western policies premised on sectarianism that engulfed the country after 2003 A bracing read, punctuated by accounts of violence, torture and extortion This book shatters western assumptions, shows the effect on Iraqis of cycles of violence - and offers cautious hope . . . A Stranger in Your Own City reminds us is that sectarianism was imposed on many Iraqis post-invasion by new rulers who . . . needed a political system based on sectarianism. This isn't just a book about war. The epilogue shows it's also about the generation who saw the folly in the invasion's design and rose up. At some point, change is inevitable. In this searing and clear-eyed account of Iraq's last two decades of conflict Abdul-Ahad expresses the broken-heartedness of a man who loses his country over and again to sectarianism and bloodshed. Abdul-Ahad writes with bitter humour and an unsentimental style, using a cast of characters - militiamen, teachers, torturers and doctors - to illuminate actions that seem almost impossible to understand; his reporting on Iraq strips away any myths and refuses to romanticise or glorify anyone or anything. It is a powerful, unforgettable book Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a journalistic marvel and a terrible joy as a writer, never wearying of the world as he maps its cruelties. He's eloquent and compassionate, vulnerable, scathing and funny when he sketches his personal life as an Iraqi among the American and European press pack, almost unbearably clear when he brings us close to the irredeemable personal injustices of war. Many have crossed over from non-western upbringing into English language reporting, but Abdul-Ahad manages to transcend that binary - he's resolutely of both and neither. It's as if you're watching a live western TV news segment from Iraq, Syria or Yemen, and from out of the crowd of anonymous locals behind the correspondent, a man steps forward, moves the reporter gently aside, and starts to speak into the camera - a reporter too, and better at it than the one he displaced, but never renouncing his old place in the world of the reported on In A Stranger in Your Own City, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is the rarest of documentarians. Having grown up in Baghdad before the American invasion, and then having worked for the foreign press, Abdul-Ahad is a stranger in the best sense of the term - a man between regimes, between languages, between even forms of expression. His beautiful line drawings are just as expressive as his trenchant prose. This book reminds us of the human costs of a war that most Americans have chosen to forget A sobering, blistering frontline account of internecine warfare in a region crying for peace Kaleidoscopic and incisive . . . Abdul-Ahad details bloody sectarian battles, heart-pounding run-ins with ISIS henchmen, and a populace trying to reclaim its city and country from Iraq's greedy ruling class and those still 'immersed in their selfish sectarian mentalities.' It's a master class in reporting A Stranger in Your Own City is a stunning piece of emotional and psychological topography, charting the many clashing lives of pre- and post-invasion Iraq. Unlike a parade of books that focused predominantly on the Westerners who helped unleash so much of the country's carnage, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad centers the people who call Iraq home. Through visceral, sometimes first-hand accounts, he tells the stories of both victims and perpetrators, never retreating into artificial neutrality. This is a vital archive of a time and place in history that, in the post-9/11 age, so many would rather forget, a book that's at once difficult to read and impossible to put down A crucial and important new voice, as brilliant, passionate and fearless as he is well-informed, skeptical and nuanced. But Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is also a writer of exquisite prose, whose thoughtful, moving and often disturbing work elevates war reportage and the memoir of conflict and loss to levels rarely seen since Michael Herr's Dispatches or James Fenton's All the Wrong Places. A Stranger in Your Own City is that rarity: a genuine melancholy masterpiece' Expand reviews