A STRANGER IN YOUR OWN CITY

A Guardian correspondent and Iraqi native travels through the Middle East to attempt to make sense of an endless bloodbath.

Abdul-Ahad’s account begins on a poignant note as he evokes a school photograph taken in 1991, just before the first Gulf War, that captures a group of early adolescent friends. “Who was a Shia, and who was a Sunni? How many were kidnapped and how many killed? How many members of militias and how many in exile?” The youngsters in the photograph were poets, businesspeople, engineers, doctors, an architect—and none live in Baghdad, so none are able to help in the author’s quest to travel among contending groups. Nothing is quite as it seems, and certainly nothing is as pat as the Western experts tucked away in the Green Zone would have it. Many of Iraq’s divisions are the result of European intrusions, but it goes much deeper: “We in the Middle East have always had a healthy appetite for factionalism,” writes the author, whether it involves individualism, tribalism, or true political unrest. That factionalism is multivariate, hinging on opportunity and survival, as when members of a tiny militia ostensibly opposed to the Syrian regime “help maintain government oil supplies in return for their villages being spared from bombardment and being allowed to siphon oil for themselves.” The author also shows his people’s astonishing capacity for suffering: Sunnis and Shias live side by side, breathe the same air, speak the same language, and yet spill each other’s blood over banners 1,500 years old. The ruins are everywhere, Abdul-Ahad writes meaningfully as he returns to his homeland, but still “the killers—bandits, insurgents, militias, soldiers—would keep travelling, deploying new tactics, implementing new horrors under different names, but they all remain the same people—Iraqis.” All will fail, he writes, but not before inflicting maximal, vengeful, useless damage.

A sobering, blistering frontline account of internecine warfare in a region crying for peace.