Saturday 31 May 2008

Baghdad before and after

The BBC's Caroline Wyatt returns to Baghdad after a 10-year absence and is looking for a shoulder to cry on in this war-torn city.

"The Baghdad I remembered was a sprawling city, a place of honking horns and barely-controlled anarchy on the roads," Wyatt starts the story.

"Amid the narrow, uneven pavements of the gold market, I jostled for space with shoppers peering closely at the gold necklaces given to brides at their wedding," Wyatt says.

"As a Westerner, I felt safe."

Alas!!!

kassakhoon@gmail.com


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kassakhoon,

That's a terrible cut. She goes on to talk about how any foreign journalist in Iraq needed a "minder," and that Iraq was a dictatorial police state with photos of Saddam everywhere. And the Mukhabarat made sure that all Iraqis lived in fear of saying the wrong thing.

C'mon, you're better than that.

*

Anonymous said...

Jeffery,

Yes that's right all foreign journalists needed "minders" with them under Saddam's dictatorial police state, but at least both (foreigners and Iraqis) knew who was the "enemy" and how to avoid them: Saddam's security forces.

But now, each Iraqi or foreigner has an enemy more worse than Saddam's mukhabarat members who made Iraqis fear of them but we were never lost the sense of security.

Talking about photos, we have a lot of photos now everywhere you go and if you try to do anything to any of these pictures only God knows what will happen to you.

I'm not a pro-Saddam person but I'm like the majority of Iraqis who yearn to Saddam's era.

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