20 Years After the Invasion: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on Iraqi Perspectives on the War and What Western Media Missed

Prize-winning Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss his new book A Stranger in Your Own City, which features Iraqi perspectives on the United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq. Abdul-Ahad talks about what Western media missed and also considers the early stages of the war and how resentment built over time. He reflects on the fall of Saddam Hussein, the ensuing Iraqi civil conflict, Western misconceptions of the country, and how the U.S. occupation planted the seeds of the Islamic State.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. 

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From the episode: 

V.V. Ganeshananthan: You begin A Stranger in Your Own City with the description of a pool in a Baghdad hotel. The American invasion of Iraq has just begun, and you tell the Western journalists at the hotel that you used to swim in this pool. You write, “They gave me kind, patronizing, and unbelieving smiles.

How dare I introduce normality into their adventure sphere? We were destined to be the victims or the victimizers in their stories.” It feels like this is one of the primal intentions of this book, to tell Iraqi stories that journalists like this ignored. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Well, when journalists congregate in a city, especially a city in war, they all tend to take over one hotel, and this hotel becomes the center of journalistic activities. And in that hotel, it almost becomes like a military camp: there is violence outside, and people are trying to congregate together to tell war stories. And when you tell them that this swimming pool was where I spent my childhood, this is where I used to swim every day, it destroys the narrative that they’ve come to tell, which is “this is a broken city, this is a tortured city, and we’re all either victims or victimizers.”

There is one thing I have in this book, which is that every single character is Iraqi. I know the Americans were a big part of this, as it was an American occupation of Iraq. But I intentionally did not include any Americans because I really wanted to tell the story from a purely Iraqi perspective.

Whitney Terrell: I was a reporter in Iraq, and I was in the Green Zone once in some bunks, and a TV crew came in. The TV people are always—in my experience, since I’m a print cover person—more arrogant than the print people. So they made everyone clear the room, they started setting up sets, they’re doing all this stuff. And I can imagine it’s even worse from an Iraqi perspective. How it would be dealing with the sort of great arrogance of media organizations.

GA: I didn’t know what the media was at that time. We grew up in Iraq, and Iraq was a very controlled and censored society. You have no access to foreign media beyond what you could listen to on shortwave radio. But I remember my first encounter with the media was the moment when I saw American soldiers in my street. Just after the soldiers came, those guys dressed in blue, with blue helmets and blue vests with the word TV. They come with these big lenses, and they’re trying to take pictures of us; it’s just this group of Iraqis sitting there.

Suddenly my sensation was that we were like a pack of wild animals and these photographers were approaching slowly, lest they scare us away, but they were also very scared of us. And it’s a very difficult situation because since then, for two decades, I myself have become a photo reporter and foreign journalist. So I always have that sensation in my head, “am I trudging into someone’s backyard? Am I walking into someone’s living room while I’m trying to tell the story?”

WT: A lot of the beginning of the book is about these great misunderstandings, things that Iraqis knew that the West completely missed about very important moments in the beginning of that war. And a good example of that would be the very famous moment when the statue of Saddam Hussein was torn down in Baghdad, which I, of course, watched on television like everybody else. That was not long after the invasion, and you were there. Your feelings about the moment were very different than the way it was portrayed in the Western media. You wrote a chapter about that, and I wonder if you could just talk about that for our listeners.

GA: So the Americans came to my street, near what is called the National Theatre square, which is just down the road. I started following these American troops, and they all congregated in this square where the statue was standing, but also where all the media were stationed at the time, the big media, and the TV crew. So we were a small group of Iraqis and a much larger group of foreign journalists. The Iraqis were trying to topple the statue, and an hour and a half later, they hadn’t done much beyond smashing some marble tiles. That’s the moment when the Americans decide to reverse one of these huge amphibious vehicles and use the crane on the back to pull down the statue.

And of course, I cringed because anyone who reads history, you realize, this is the moment that should have been the Iraqi moment. It had to be an Iraqi moment if you want to maintain that charade of freedom of the people kind of toppling their own statue. So the Americans pulling the statue was the first cringing moment. The second moment was when the Marine who climbed up and put the big noose around the statue’s head pulled out an American flag and draped it around Saddam’s head.

At that time, I was like, “oh, no, don’t do that.” This is the moment that we’ll be playing again and again on TV cameras. That’s it. This is an American war. Since then, I came to realize that that Marine was more honest than any politician or any pundit ever because he saw the war as a conflict between his army, the United States Army, and Iraq. He didn’t see it as a war of liberation or freedom. It was his right to pull out his own flag as a person who’s been fighting all the way to Baghdad. And I think his act was honest. But of course, that sealed that intention in the eyes of many.

VVG: You also talk about how furious Iraqis were when they discovered that U.S. troops were far less organized than they expected.

GA: I would say the majority of Iraqis were very happy to see the end of the Saddam regime. They were not necessarily happy to see an occupation after an invasion and war, but they wanted to get rid of Saddam in one way or another. So there was this very short period in which they believed “Oh, my God, this is the United States of America. This is the biggest country in the world. Look at their tanks and their equipment and their machines. Of course, they will turn Iraq into Dubai within a month, and they will rebuild electricity within weeks.”

Twenty years later, we still don’t have electricity. So there was a sense of disbelief when the Iraqis woke up a month, two months later, to see the utter chaos in the streets, the looting, and the infrastructure that was destroyed during the sanctions. That’s when they saw that the Americans had no clue. They couldn’t stop the looting, they only protected the Ministry of Oil, and they allowed the Iraqi museum to be looted. That frustration; most Iraqis couldn’t believe that the Americans had done no planning. Of course, what they thought was, “Oh, this is all a conspiracy to destroy Iraq, this great nation.” That was the moment when the frustration turned into anger and turned into fury.

Ghath Abdul-Ahad

 • A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War  • Unembedded: Four Photojournalists on the Iraq War  • “Baghdad Memories: what the first months of U.S. occupation felt like to an Iraqi” The Guardian  •  The Battle for Syria, FRONTLINE (documentary)  •  A Legacy of Brutality and Corruption: Life in the New Iraq Literary Hub

Others

 •  Hans Fallada  •  “Bullshit Saviors: Helen Benedict and Nadia Hashimi on Depictions of the American Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 4, Episode 26   •   “The Legacy of ISIS: Dunya Mikhail on Yazidi Women Captives in Iraq,” Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 12