Sectarianism

• Baghdad native and former architect Ghaith Abdul-Ahad traces his start as a journalist to the day Saddam Hussein’s statue was toppled in central Baghdad, on April 9 2003 – two weeks after US troops invaded the city.
• Framed as a watershed moment, Western media coverage at the time “heavily implied” the statue was taken down by “a large crowd of cheering Iraqis”.
• But expressions of gratitude for the American goal of “restoring democracy” were not unanimous.
• ‘Show the world American democracy.’

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Beyond ‘shock and awe’

• In the two decades since the brutal invasion, its architects have held onto near-total impunity.
• And in 2019, the UK government even sought to grant amnesty to troops who committed war crimes during their deployment.
• Countless memoirs from US and UK veterans published over the past two decades betray persisting delusions of heroism.

Sweeping and dynamic

• A Stranger in Your Own City is sweeping in scope.
• It doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre, but reads at once like a travelogue, geo-biography, memoir and political history.
• But this dynamic collection rarely meanders, nor does it lose the reader in its frequent shifts in focus.
• Instead, its structure foregrounds what the book does best: unsettling the enduring myths about the origins of Iraq’s never-ending crisis.

Sectarian tensions heightened by occupation

• Here, Abdul-Ahad challenges the widely held view that sectarian tensions were an entrenched and longstanding source of conflict in Iraq before 2003.
• We learn instead that sectarianism was, in fact, catalysed by the US occupation – namely in the formation of the post-Saddam government.
• Ultimately, these networks functioned as “personal fiefdoms” that distributed and privatised resources and services following sectarian quotas.
• And, as Abdul-Ahad argues, the rearranging of Iraqi society across sectarian lines – both socially and geographically – fuelled the civil wars to come.

An extension of America’s war

• Abdul-Ahad challenges the binary view of Iraqi societal tensions as split neatly between Sunni and Shia Muslims following the 2006 civil war.
• He examines a “wide range of localised schisms and fault lines, feuds based on class or geography”.
• Despite this ever-changing political climate, Abdul-Ahad contends, “as for the Iraqis, friend and foe alike, this was still an extension of America’s war, even if it was now only Iraqis who were butchering Iraqis”.
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Disaster capitalism in Iraq

• Abdul-Ahad illustrates how the Gulf War and 13 years of crippling sanctions “brought [Iraq] to its knees”.
• Disaster capitalists exploit and even manufacture political and economic crises so they can introduce vastly transformative neoliberal policies amid the chaos.
• In this context, the invasion of Iraq was anything but a failure in the eyes of its architects.
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A productive tension

• As I write this review, I’m reminded the representational responsibilities of a book like this aren’t set in stone.
• Abdul-Ahad very deliberately resists buying into a reductive narrative about what caused the war – and rightly so.
• A productive tension emerges between Abdul-Ahad’s personal understanding of Iraqi society and politics and those of his interviewees, complicating the Western media’s monolithic rendering of Iraqis.
• But this pressure risks depoliticising their experiences – and relegating their historical and political contexts to the narrative margins.

‘Deeply human’, but still political

• But Abdul-Ahad mostly avoids this trap, without sacrificing either personal resonance or political subjectivity.
• While the protests failed to inspire substantial political change, the reverberations of a “larger more common identity” were felt.
• In the wake of the Tishreen Movement, Abdul-Ahad renders an image of ambivalent, angry steadfastness and hope.