This transcript is from a CSIS podcast published on September 6, 2023. Listen to the podcast here.
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 invasion of Kuwait and American sanctions, and many subsequent wars. So, probably the simple answer is curiosity. It's been the same journey ever since.
Jon Alterman: I've been struck that when you appear in English-language outlets, you're generally identified as an Iraqi journalist, but in Arabic outlets, you're identified as a British journalist of Iraqi origin. Is that intentional on your part? And what does it mean?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: I'm Iraqi. I only have an Iraqi passport. I don't have any other passport. I would love to be a British of Iraqi origin, but unfortunately or fortunately, I'm just Iraqi. I think it is a matter that Iraqi media, they would not understand why an Iraqi journalist only writes in English and not in Arabic, so it must be a Brit of Iraqi origin.
The answer to that is it isn't intentional. I don't write in Arabic because I would like to continue to write, and had I been writing in Arabic, I don't think I would have survived the last two decades of war reporting in Iraq. A lot of my colleagues and friends and other Iraqi journalists who wrote in Arabic were targeted, killed, or silenced. Writing in English provides a form of protection.
Jon Alterman: One of the consistent themes in your book that you come back to it time and time again is that the Iraq you grew up in never seemed sectarian to you and that it was really the U.S.-led war that turned Iraq into a heavily sectarian place. Why do you think that sectarian framing resonated so much with the U.S. government?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: It's a very simple narrative, especially after the wars in Yugoslavia.
Now, that narrative of Bosnian, Muslim, Serbs, Croat, did not fit into Iraq, but since the mid-'90s, a group of Iraqi exiles or politicians helped craft this narrative.
Jon Alterman: Such as Ahmed Chalabi, whom I certainly met in Washington in the 1990s.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Chalabi and others, some of whom grew up in Beirut and others in Tehran, framed the Saddam regime as a sectarian regime because that was the way they could market toppling the regime.
Saddam was evil. He was a dictator. He should have been toppled for so many reasons. However, was the regime —the Iraq that I grew up in as a young high school and university student — sectarian? No.
Are there Sunnis and Shi’a? Yes. Do they have differences? Yes. Had there been conflict 1500 years ago? Yes. The post-2003 sectarian civil war in Iraq was not written in the stars. There could've been different outcomes.
Jon Alterman: One of the things that surprised me in the book is that you seem constantly surprised that people turned out to be of a different sect than you had sort of assumed.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: I grew up in a lower-middle-class family in Baghdad. Some family members even worked for the government but none of my family members joined the Ba'ath Party, and none were persecuted by the Ba'ath Party.
Social class was far more important than sectarian identity, so all my family, friends, and parents' friends had intermarriages. It was a geographical identity rather than a political identity. Social class, tribe, region, and wealth mattered a lot more than sectarian identity in the Iraq of the '80s and '90s.
Jon Alterman: As you traveled more in the country, did you come to feel that maybe there was a sense of solidarity against a Sunni regime in the South that really nobody felt aligned to, and that as the south was suppressed, there was more of a sectarian identity in parts of the country? Or was that never really true?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: It is partly true. The Americans did two things when they invaded Iraq. First, they created this narrative of victimhood with the oppressed and an oppressor. If Saddam was an oppressor and the oppressed were, according to the Americans, Shi’as from the South, then by association all the Sunnis are oppressors. It is similar to denazification but it is not about political party, it is a part of the community. Suddenly, 30 to 40 percent of the population is associated with Saddam’s crime.
Now, there are two big problems here. Saddam would never tolerate any opposition being Sunni or Shi’ite, being Islamists or communists or secular. Everyone was targeted by the regime oppressors and security forces.
Secondly, in 2003 right after the fall of Saddam, many people, even from Saddam’s hometown were happy to get rid of Saddam because he was leading Iraq from one war to another. However, within months of his fall, an entire group of people were accused of being responsible for his crimes. What do you think they would do?
Another thing, Shi’a and Kurds have their own identities which have evolved throughout centuries. The Sunnis never saw themselves as Sunnis. The Sunnis saw themselves as tribesmen from Ramadi, merchants from Mosul, middle class of Baghdad, and farmers from Diyala.
Suddenly, they are all put in the corner and are told that they are guilty of these crimes and they should go create a political system. In this position, they came up with a political system based on rejecting everything from the Americans, which led to the civil war.
Jon Alterman: Another consistent theme in your book, besides sectarianism and the introduction of sectarianism after the war, is the issue of accountability, and your sense that nobody's ever really held accountable in Iraq right now. What would accountability look like in Iraq?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: We still don't know how many Iraqis died. There are estimations, but we don't know how many Iraqis died because of the invasion or the civil war. We don't know how many Iraqis died in the Battle of Mosul. We don't know how many civilians died. If we don't know how many people died, how can we have accountability? In March this year, I was in Baghdad and I was doing a story about a militia commander whose name struck fear in the heart of every Iraqi. He was synonymous with the civil war. His militiamen kidnapped and killed thousands.
This guy is portraying himself now as a philanthropist. He goes around at the beginning of the month distributing salaries or giving a frozen chicken to orphans and widows. That guy managed to do this because there is no accountability. The same thing with the Iraqi parliament or the Iraqi government. There are people there who have blood on their hands, and suddenly we don't talk about it
Accountability doesn't mean seeking revenge. Accountability is knowing our history, because if we don't know the history, we will keep repeating the same stories repeatedly.
Jon Alterman: As an Iraqi, what do you think accountability for the United States would look like?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: There are people who were portraying themselves as these elder politicians. Those people have blood on their hands.
I do not want Nuremberg. I just want someone to come out and admit to what they did. I don't even want the word sorry. I just want you to acknowledge the impact of the war.
People up until today—those who remember the Iraq war 20 years ago still portray themselves as knowing the right decision or blaming problems on post-war planning.
No. The whole thing was a disaster that caused so much pain and suffering for the United States as well as Iraq.
Jon Alterman: I want to pivot from talking about Iraq to talking about the way that you did your job reporting on Iraq. You and I were both friends with the late Washington Post and New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid.
Anthony had a different approach to the reporting he did. How did you see him doing his job? How did you see it differently from the way other Western reporters worked in Iraq? How did that shape the way you saw your own role as a reporter in Iraq?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: I'm very lucky that when I started my journalism, I started as a translator, working with or beside some of the greatest reporters like James Meek of The Guardian and Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post. It was like going to the best school of journalism ever.
What struck me about Anthony Shadid is his smile. He was constantly smiling. He never shouted. He was never angry. He was never holding his pen and pointing at someone and demanding the truth. He always had this very kind and gentle smile, and what struck me the most is how soft-spoken he was in the worst of situations.
I've seen Anthony Shadid in the war in Lebanon in 2006, and he was the calmest, coolest person, and I think that's what I learned from him.
Jon Alterman: You've gone from reporting on war zones in your own country to reporting from war zones in other countries—Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. Arguably, you've gone from being somebody who is a fixer and translator to somebody who uses fixers and translators. How does your background in that role influence the way you do your work?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: We spoke about the amazing journalists–Anthony Shadid, James Meek, and others– but then there are other journalists who are an example of what you should not do when you are in a foreign country.
Jon Alterman: I won’t ask for a lot of names, but I would not mind one or two.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: I won’t mention any but those people who would march into a country and demand answers and feel they are doing an amazing service to humanity by being there. Those are the people who are in my mind whenever I am traveling as an outsider and I try to always remember not to make the same mistakes.
Again, it's the Anthony Shadid school of journalism, which was, “Be humble, talk softly, and try to listen and understand.”
There was a lot of debate, since the Iraq War about local journalism versus foreign journalism, who can do the job better. I think it's the language. It does not matter if you are a foreigner as long as you can understand. What distinguished, Anthony Shadid, of course, was the fact that he spoke Arabic, that he spent years and years and years learning Arabic and you can see him in the ledger conversing with clerics and ayatollahs and militiamen because he could talk to them in their own language.
Jon Alterman: I know Anthony worked in Arabic, and I always heard his Arabic as being American-accented. However, what struck me about him was his remarkable capacity for empathy. The way he wrote about Iraq in his book, Night Draws Near, which was done from his Washington Post reporting, was caring deeply not about the thing that everybody knew to care about, but caring deeply about all the people who were watching, caring deeply about impacts, caring deeply about ordinary people who were affected by the main action whose feelings and actions would otherwise be completely lost to history. It was his commitment to that empathy and making the reader empathetic that, in my mind, was what really distinguished him.
I never really saw him working very much in Arabic, but I saw him bringing that empathy to Western audiences when almost nobody else was able to or was interested in doing it.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: One of the things that distinguishes Anthony Shadid is the way he reported about victims with dignity. Starting in 2008 but especially by 2011, there was a severe fatigue of Iraq – of reporting from Iraq and reporting from Baghdad and reporting on car bombs.
I myself started seeing all the car bombs in Baghdad as one movie reel where scenes got mixed and so on. Anthony managed to give dignity to all the victims and to all the people, no matter how often it happened. His work from 2011 is filled with emotions, filled with lives, and that is what distinguishes Anthony Shadid; there was no fatigue or laziness in his writing.
Jon Alterman: He also told me several times that it was time for him to leave Iraq behind. As you know, he went and rebuilt a family home in Lebanon that he wrote about in his book, House of Stone, which was published posthumously.
He felt that it was just too much to constantly do Iraq. Do you feel the same way? I mean, we're talking to you from Istanbul. Is there a limit to how much Iraq you can take? Do Iraqis that you know patriotic to the country still feel that that cannot live in Iraq?
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad: Yes, of course, there is a limit to how much you can absorb of a certain conflict. I remember - an evening in Beirut perhaps in 2007 or 2009, I was back from a trip in Somalia or Afghanistan, and I was just young and happy with myself that I did this trip. I remember Anthony Shadid telling me, "You can travel wherever you want, you can write about whatever you want, but at the end of the day, you have to write about Iraq."
At that time, it struck me, "Why are you telling me this? I'm very happy. I'm traveling around the world." Here we are, 20 years later, and my book is about Iraq. He was right.
Jon Alterman: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is the author of a remarkable book, Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War. Ghaith, thank you so much for joining us on Babel.
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad:
Thank you so much.
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