Born and raised in Baghdad, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad trained as an architect but stumbled into a career in journalism when, shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he took a job as translator for a Guardian reporter. He went on to become a respected foreign correspondent covering Middle Eastern affairs; his reporting on the Syrian civil war earned him an Orwell prize for journalism in 2014. In Stranger in Your Own City, he chronicles the past two decades of turmoil with an engaging blend of memoir, reportage and interviews. It is a story of catastrophic societal breakdown, culminating in violence and terror on an unprecedented scale: under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, he writes, “at least we knew the parameters of fear, and we knew how to survive. In the midst of this chaos, no one knew anything any more.”
Abdul-Ahad starts with the prehistory: the eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s, the 40-day conflict over Kuwait in 1990-91 and the ensuing 13 years of UN sanctions. Then, in 2003, came the invasion and resultant insurgency: the slide into anarchy so tragically symbolised by the pillaging of the national museum; the appointment of a governing council that “would enable a coalition of corrupt, imbecilic warlords to … create one of the most corrupt nations on Earth”; the degeneration of state and society into banditry and sectarianism amid a dizzying proliferation of religious and political factions, and later on, the rise of Islamic State.
