December 19, 2006
So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which [...]

So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which ones I’d [...]

The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an American air strike somewhere to the south according to local government official Amr something-or-other and he was heading towards the site, then the [...]

December 11, 2006
The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an American air strike somewhere to the south according to local government official Amr something-or-other and he was heading towards the site, [...]

I read the recommendations and descriptions of the Iraq Study Group report wit a mixture of elation and rage. Elation because this was the final nail in the coffin of the whole incredibly destructive US neo-con mission to remake the Middle East. It was the reassertion of traditional realpolitik over US policy — not necessarily [...]

This article from the NYT from Dec. 2 about a British initiative in Afghanistan’s Helmand province caught my eye. After fighting the Taliban in Musa Qala district, British forces “who had been under siege by the Taliban in a compound there for three months” brokered a ceasefire with Taliban forces and local government – and [...]

November 24, 2006
It was just such a classic Baghdad return. The sky was hazy and overcast as we drove back from the airport. The traffic was bad, a convoy of SUVs featuring guys with assault rifles hanging out of the window came blaring past. And then back at the office a bombing that killed 25 [...]

My friend Paul Schemm, a journalist in Baghdad, sends regular personal dispatches from there. His latest is about something we both like a lot — Battlestar Galactica. This season (the third) is replete with references to tawhid, the Islamic concept of monotheism or “oneness of God” that is unfortunately more famous as a jihadi terms. [...]

October 22, 2006
They beat up one of our photographers today.
And smashed his cameras. Now that’s pretty tough – not so much slapping around our photographer and threatening to drag him into a car so that he could join the ranks of nameless corpses, that’s common. But destroying these big clunky professional Canons, with metal frames [...]

October 3, 2006
It was our fault. We brought him down. He seemed to be a perfectly good judge and by all counts was doing a better job than some of his predecessors.
He just made a little slip and we pounced on him.
This trial was supposed to be different. The first trial of Saddam Hussein [...]

September 11, 2006
It was a graveyard. That was the only way to describe it. The place where old war machines came to die. Row upon row of massive sand-colored metal tanks, their huge guns each raised to a different height, sat there like a frozen image of a clumsy chorus line.
There weren’t just tanks either, [...]

August 6, 2006
We were nearing the end of our patrol when we got a call about a UXO incident – unexploded ordnance. Someone, somewhere had found some kind of exploded bomb and we were sent to deal with it.
Actually, our patrol was just there to secure the area and provide security while the EOD (explosives [...]

August 2, 2006
In the midst of this whole mess, the last place I expected to find people who liked America was west Baghdad.
West Baghdad, roughly speaking, is the Sunni part of a very mixed city, and has the distinction of being the home to a pretty nasty insurgency for the last few years – you [...]

July 11, 2006
It was supposed to get better. That was my tacit, agreement with myself about coming here. The idea being that 2005 was a bad year, some kinks had to be worked out and then this year it would all get better.
There were to be elections, and then a new government and then Iraqis [...]

June 6, 2006
Last Saturday, I went to see a mass grave.
I have to say that ranked up there with one of the more disturbing experiences, if just for some its mundane details. We were flown out there by the Americans to some god forsaken spot in the middle of the desert early in the [...]

May 31, 2006
The other day I got to experience one of the few perks of the job out here and attended a monthly lunch for journalists thrown by Baghdad division commander, Major General J.D. Thurman of the 4th Infantry Division.
I had to use his name in a story once and asked a subordinate what the [...]

May 14, 2006
It was hard coming back. I mean it’s never easy, but this time around, after three weeks in Cairo and getting married, it just seemed that much tougher. I also knew, I was now half way done.
I waited two hours at the airport until the security team was free to come pick [...]

April 16, 2006
Iraq is a flat country. No, mean really flat. Even the topographically challenged Nile valley comes across as lumpy compared to the pancake flat perfection of Iraq’s landscape.
I took a chopper up north the other day, stopped by Tikrit, home of the big guy, and then moved on to Kirkuk the next day. [...]

April 6, 2006
He was described to me once as the office’s very own little Saddam Hussein. Salah Jali doesn’t really have a proper title, but he’s one of the mainstays of the AFP Baghdad bureau.
 
After the all important tech guy, Salah is the only one who has his own private office from where he rules [...]

March 28, 2006
I came back from my latest break in Cairo and then spent an entire week cooped inside the Baghdad hotel where the office is.
Outside Iraqis wondered whether full blown civil war had broken out as the tide of tortured corpses mounts, while inside I was wondering why I always had to ask for [...]