A Stranger in Your Own City, and Taking Sides: hard-hitting Middle East journalism memoirs

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has written an astonishing book. To read A Stranger in Your Own City is virtually to live through the past 40 wretched years of Iraq’s history.

Abdul-Ahad was five years old when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. He calls Saddam by his Baathist sobriquet, the Leader Necessity.

Like Vladimir Putin, Saddam admired Stalin. In Iran, as in present-day Ukraine, the initial assault failed, and the war dragged on. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers slept in trenches, were killed, or maimed. Life continued almost normally in cities, except for missile strikes or when male relatives left for the front.

Abdul-Ahad spent much of the 1991 war copying drawings from comic books. He became a skilled draughtsman and has illustrated his book with drawings and watercolours of ruined buildings, gunmen, wrecked armour, cemeteries and corpses.

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Abdul-Ahad studied architecture, dodged conscription and tried unsuccessfully to emigrate during the “hunger years” of the 1990s. He poses the essential question about the 2003 US-led invasion: “Why were the only options for us as a nation and a people the choice between a foreign invasion and a noxious regime led by a brutal dictator?”

I was paralysed by a sickening feeling that I was intruding on people in their most intimate moment, when they were injured, hurt and dying

—  Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

His descriptions are vivid and humorous. The US helicopter which hangs over rooftops on the day Saddam falls is “nimble, like a mean wasp”. US amphibious vehicles “spread around the intersection near my flat, as if the shores of Normandy lay just behind the buildings”. American soldiers “knelt on a single knee and pointed their guns at us, the handful of people who stood watching them”. A cameraman moves gingerly towards the Iraqi onlookers “like a wildlife photographer approaching a herd of wild animals, not wanting to scare them away and yet not sure if they might charge him.”

Young American and British correspondents with their “we-liberated-the-city attitude” invariably ask interviewees if they are Sunni or Shia. “They asked it in a crass and vulgar way. There was no subtlety about it, just in-your-face directness and urgency, as if everything depended on that single answer.”

The day after Saddam falls, the Guardian newspaper hires Abdul-Ahad as an interpreter/fixer. In December 2003, he writes his first newspaper article, about how he and Saddam both spent the night in prison, though not together. Abdul-Ahad had travelled to Saddam’s hometown for some “vox pop” on the day of the dictator’s arrest. The Americans found him suspicious.

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“The occupation was bound to collapse and fail … because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy,” Abdul-Ahad writes. “No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.”

He is in the Shia holy city of Kerbala when bombs explode in March 2004, killing more than 100 Shia pilgrims. When Abdul-Ahad tries to take pictures, “I was paralysed by a sickening feeling that I was intruding on people in their most intimate moment, when they were injured, hurt and dying.”

Armed with an array of fake IDs, Abdul-Ahad embeds himself with every faction, Sunni and Shia, including al-Qaeda and Islamic State. He spends several days with mostly foreign Sunni jihadis in Fallujah in late 2004. “They all felt oppressed and humiliated by the regimes of their homeland, and the western powers that propped them up. They were united in their hopes of fighting the infidel American occupation and were still intoxicated by the ‘victories’ of the 9/11 attacks.”

In Mosul, Abdul-Ahad witnesses house-to-house combat, torture and ‘an orgy of executions’

Years later in Ramadi, Iraq’s “Sunni heartland”, Abdul-Ahad counts 14 factions fighting each other, two Shia and 12 Sunni. In Syria, he observes that the enmity between Iraqi jihadis loyal to the so-called Islamic State or Isis and the Syrian jihadis of Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda reflects the earlier schism between Iraqi and Syrian Ba’athists.

Abdul-Ahad barely mentions his own feelings and injuries. In 2004, a US armoured vehicle is ambushed in Haifa Street, Baghdad. US helicopter gunships fire on the crowd. Abdul-Ahad is bleeding from the head, but his main concern is to avoid getting blood on his camera lens. His description of the dead and wounded around him is truly haunting.

In 2016-2017, Abdul-Ahad embeds with the Shia-led Iraqi army when it retakes Mosul from Isis. The jihadis detonate a truck bomb outside their billet. The ceiling collapses. “I touched my head, it was still there, my hands were there too, but my feet were numb. I tried to pull them up, but they were trapped under the rubble… I didn’t know if my feet or the camera should be the priority.”

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In Mosul, Abdul-Ahad witnesses house-to-house combat, torture and “an orgy of executions”. Parched with thirst, hungry and dying in large numbers, Iraqi soldiers are under pressure to reach the Tigris so that officials from Baghdad can declare victory. Officers tell Abdul-Ahad that after Mosul, they expect to fight Shia militias or Kurds.

Twenty years after the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, 12 years after the American withdrawal, Iraq remains a broken country whose people endure rule by militias and corrupt politicians. This is the dismal legacy of George W Bush’s administration, recorded by Abdul-Ahad for history.

Perhaps it was the cover photograph of a beautiful young woman in a flak jacket marked PRESS, frowning fiercely on a rooftop above a burning city, or the blurb describing the book as “a coming-of-age-chronicle”. At first glance, I misjudged Sherine Tadros’s memoir.

Taking Sides is an engaging, intelligent and intensely personal story set against the backdrop of conflict in Lebanon, Gaza and Egypt

Tadros admits in the prologue that two days before she was interviewed for the post of Amnesty International’s representative at the United Nations, “my life had been ripped away from me… I had spent most of the time since in bed, on a cocktail of anxiety medication and sleeping pills …”

What sounds melodramatic and self-pitying turns out to be moving and totally understandable when Tadros’s commitment-phobic fiance backs out on their wedding day, three-quarters of the way through the book.

Taking Sides is an engaging, intelligent and intensely personal story set against the backdrop of conflict in Lebanon, Gaza and Egypt. Tadros’s observations about the callous and superficial side of television journalism are well-founded, her progression from journalism to activism inspiring.

Tadros is brought up by affluent Coptic Christians in London. Both parents come from wealthy families in Egypt, but they start from scratch in London, enduring racial slurs and running a chipper at King’s Cross.

Little Sherine longs to conform. She is embarrassed when her parents speak Arabic in front of her friends, hides the religious symbols scattered through the family home. Though she was born and raised in London and went to posh schools, the BBC refuses to hire her on the grounds she has an accent. ITV tells her she is “too exotic” for British television.

After Hosni Mubarak dispatches an army of hired thugs known as baltagiya to attack the protesters, [Sherine Tadros] is one of at least eight women who are sexually assaulted during the clashes

Tadros bungles her first live report for Al Jazeera English, from Beirut, during clashes between Hizbullah and government forces. She is jarred by the echo of her own voice coming back to her through earbuds, accidentally hits a lever on the swivel chair and drops three inches in front of the camera, so viewers see only her eyes and forehead.

Israel’s three-week assault on the Gaza Strip in December 2008-January 2009 is Tadros’s baptism of fire. A 12-year-old boy dies in front of her from an open stomach wound. “I could feel myself getting angrier as the seconds passed,” she writes. “Ali died on the floor in unbearable agony. His mother’s face stayed buried in her dead son’s chest until they eventually took him away.”

Thirteen Israelis and 1,400 Palestinians perished in that Gaza war. Tadros finds herself weeping as she interviews Rima, a single mother with three children. Asked why he clings constantly to Rima, six-year-old Aseel replies: “So that when my mother dies, I die too.”

Tadros’s reporting from the Tahrir Square revolution in Cairo at the beginning of 2011 is graphic and courageous. After Hosni Mubarak dispatches an army of hired thugs known as baltagiya to attack the protesters, she is one of at least eight women who are sexually assaulted during the clashes. Despite the terrifying experience, she shares the protesters’ soon-to-be-dashed hopes for a new Egypt when Mubarak resigns.

Tadros leaves a job as Sky News bureau chief in Cairo to work for Amnesty International because she wants to influence events rather than just report them. She recounts two small lobbying victories at the UN, for a resolution establishing a mechanism to monitor human rights abuses in Syria, and another condemning Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Children are often asked what they want to be, Tadros concludes her book. She has learned the difference between being and doing. A bystander no longer, “I can be someone who strives to change the world – one small act at a time.”

Lara Marlowe is Paris Correspondent of The Irish Times. She worked extensively in the Middle East for more than 25 years.

Further reading

Bloodshed, suffering, injustice and western bungling are inevitably themes of books about the Middle East. BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen’s The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History (Picador, 2022) recounts more than 30 years of strife with Bowen’s habitual calm and clarity.

In Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East (St Martin’s Press, 2020), Philip H Gordon, who was White House co-ordinator for the Middle East under Barack Obama, studies seven disastrous decades of US intervention in the region: in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya and Syria.

Three Worlds, Memoir of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld June 2023) by Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford is a book to look forward to. Shlaim was born in Baghdad and became a leading New Historian in Israel. An earlier work, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Penguin, 2014) remains the definitive history of the Arab-Israeli wars.