Ghaith abdul ahad biography sample paper

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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Iraq Through Iraqis’ Eyes

Jon Alterman: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is an award-winning journalist for The Guardian newspaper in the UK. He is the author of a recent and remarkable book, A Stranger in Your Own City: Travel in the Middle East's Long War. Ghaith, welcome to Babel.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Jon Alterman: You went from being a draft evader in Saddam Hussein's Iraq to being a translator and fixer for journalists and then a journalist yourself. What was surprising to you about that journey?

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Well, it's still surprising to me. To be honest with you, I do not know why I followed the American convoy that entered Baghdad in April 2003. I do not know why I stood in the square, watching the statue falling, and I really don't know what made me walk through American checkpoints claiming that I was a British journalist the next day. Basically, lying my way through American checkpoints all the way to Saddam's palace. I really don't know. Probably, because I grew up in Iraq all my life. I lived in Iraq all my life. I always wanted to answer some questions: Why did Saddam do what he did? Why our lives were shaped the way they were?

I saw war, the first war when I was five or six, then another war, then the

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The Turkish Left

When at the end of May protesters in Istanbul began their occupation of Gezi Park, to stop its planned transformation into a mall, they also built barricades on the streets surrounding it. Some of the barricades were ad hoc structures: plant pots, rubbish bins, paving slabs and an occasional street sign, assembled hastily at night and lost to the police in the morning. Others were more permanent: urban fortifications made from burned-out vehicles, metal sheeting propped up against rubble from construction sites, reinforced by iron rods. These barricades grew every day, with constant alterations and modifications. In two weeks of clashes, Istanbul acquired that distinctive, delicious air of normality in a time of upheaval, when life and war brush shoulders, both waking up each morning bemused and surprised to find that the other still exists. The park, perched on the edge of a vast building site that was threatening to consume it, became a tent city and a centre of protest for all kinds of noble cause, a platform from which to vent grievances against an increasingly authoritarian prime minister.

The barricades became a fixture of the city, another Istanbul tourist attraction. Teenagers took pictures of one another in burned-out buses and climbed to the to