Acclaimed blogger Riverbend is fleeing Baghdad

Letter from Blogosphere: Riverbend is leaving Baghdad. Thousands of readers will miss her elegant and eloquent blog, Baghdad Burning, about her country under US occupation.

The decision to leave was clearly problematic and painful because her family has been discussing it since last summer, she wrote in her April 26th entry. Now they are considering logistics. Leaving Iraq can be as dangerous as staying on and securing asylum can be difficult, as two million Iraqis who fled the country have discovered.

Riverbend's first blog appeared on August 17th, 2003, four months and eight days after the conquest of Baghdad. She began with the bold statement: "I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway."

Although she never surrendered her identity beyond her pseudonym, she gradually revealed that she lives with her parents and a younger brother, called E, and that the family is Sunni-Shia, as are an estimated 25-30 per cent of Iraqis. She lived abroad until a teenager, was educated in English and emerged bilingual from university computer studies.

As the first Baghdad "girl blogger" she brought the female perspective to front-line war reporting by Iraqi civilians. Many bloggers have taken to the net since Riverbend, but none has matched her acuity.

Her nom de guerreis taken from a line in an unfinished poem she wrote for a friend: "I'll meet you 'round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend." But it has been impossible to mend Iraq since it fell to US-led forces.

In her initial entries Riverbend revealed why: the Bush administration's reliance on exiled politicians, particularly Shia fundamentalists, and its decision to allocate posts according to ethnic (Arab or Kurd) or sectarian (Shia or Sunni) background. She called the 2003 US-appointed governing council "the most elaborate puppet show Iraq has ever seen" and branded subsequent governments as puppets.

Before the war she estimated that 55 per cent of women in Baghdad wore the headscarf or hijab of conservative Muslims but there was no public pressure to do so. She herself dressed in jeans and shirts. But the rise of the fundamentalists has meant: "Females can no longer leave their homes alone. Each time I go out, E and either a father, uncle or cousin has to accompany me. It feels like we've gone back 50 years . . . A woman, or girl, out alone risks anything from insults to abduction . . . Before the war, around 50 per cent of college students were females, and over 50 per cent of the working force was composed of women. Not so anymore."

Since her employers could not guarantee her safety in the office, she lost her job as a computer programmer and joined the 65 per cent of Iraqis whom the occupation rendered unemployed.

She castigated Washington for excluding from power intelligent, cultured Iraqis who neither backed nor opposed Saddam Hussein but who remained in their country over the decades of his rule, war and sanctions. These are sane, secular, democratic- minded Iraqis who could have built a new, progressive, decent Iraq, one for all Iraqis whatever their sect or ethnic grouping.

Over the past year, her postings have been infrequent, reflecting the loss of energy felt by Iraqis plagued by the lack of security, water, electricity, and jobs. Her latest posting focused on the wall US troops are building around the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya. She accused Washington of trying to divide Iraqis physically to augment sectarian political divisions fostered since 2003. She wrote: "I remember Baghdad before the war - one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbours were - we didn't care.

No one asked about religion or sect . . . Our lives revolve around [this issue] now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it - depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night."

At its peak her blog had 5,000-8,000 hits a day. In December 2003 Baghdad Burning received an award for the best Asian blog. Two of her books, Baghdad Burningand Baghdad Burning II, were published in several languages. In 2005 the first book won third place for the Letter Ulysses Award for the art of reportage, and in 2006 it was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize, named for the 18th-century British man of letters.

Baghdad Burning has been made into several plays produced in New York City and dramatised by BBC Radio 4.

Riverbend will join in exile Salam Pax, another famous Baghdad blogger. They have both grieved for the country they, and millions of Iraqis, have lost. There is no place in today's vicious, violent Iraq for sanity and decency.