Baghdad: City of walls
For the fifth anniversary of the US/British-led invasion of Iraq, the Guardian’s award-winning foreign correspondent Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has teamed up with ITV News to bring us a series of extraordinary films for the ITV News and guardian.co.uk. In these unprecedented films he, as an Iraqi, goes where foreign journalists can no long go - to the heart of Baghdad’s most dangerous sectarian zones. He uncovers Iraq’s own killing field where only the “killers and the killed” can visit; and he reveals the desperate truth of the trafficked children of Iraq. Baghdad: City of Walls will run on guardian.co.uk and the ITV Evening News and News at Ten from Monday next week.
Videos in this series:
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Video: Baghdad’s killing fieldsVideo (4min 27sec): Ghaith Abdul-Ahad visits Baghdad’s killings fields on the edge of Sadr City, the scene of thousands of sectarian murders over the last three years |
Video: Baghdad: City of wallsVideo (4min 37sec): In the first of Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s films to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, he investigates claims that the US military surge is bringing stability to Iraq |
Video: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad journeys to Baghdad’s killing fieldVideo (2min 34sec): Ghaith Abdul-Ahad teams up with ITV News for a series of extraordinary films that go to the heart of the real Baghdad, uncovering Iraq’s own killing field where only the ‘killers and the killed’ ever go |
Source: Baghdad: City of walls | World news | guardian.co.uk
Indexed under: Baghdad, Child Exploitation, Child Poverty, Child Prostitution, Children, Children - selling of, Death Squads, Health, Poverty, Surge Failure
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- Mar 20, 2008: Gorilla’s Guides » Blog Archive » Video: Iraq’s lost generation
Thank you for posting links to these videos. I’m going to share them on my blog.
Isn’t there some way of showing this to the entire world? Particularly the USA? Can’t someone hack Fox News and run it instead of the latest footage of politicians saying ‘everything is okay’?
Thank you Katharine - there is a fourth one which we will be putting up as well.
meaculpa: Thank you also for commenting. The one word answer is “no” but you already knew that. I sympathize but I do not think it would work even if it was possible to do it. I think few Americans would care, and most would simply blame Irakis for what has been done to them. Americans need to see themselves as the “good guys” particularly when most of them are guilty of, at the very least, acquiescing in an act of monstrous evil. And they don’t like being on the losing side.
Re: your reply to meaculpa. Generalizations are usually inaccurate. There are many,many Americans who do NOT blame the victims and who place the blame squarely where it belongs - on our administration and Bush, the idiotic puppet for the Puppet Masters. The pet poodle media, owned by Big Businesses, pander to BushCo and his masters and do NOT publish accurate news, twist and distort such news as is presented, favoring the position of the administration. False polls are sometimes published, presenting another inaccurate picture of the citizens.The only source those of us in the know to get accurate news is via foreign publications. Bush has enacted laws designed to squash dissent; dissenters can possibly be charged with a variety of crimes, even treason for “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”, which may be met with execution. Since Bush is the “decider”, it is his perogative to decide the crimes. Hasn’t happened yet? Just wait; it will. Meanwhile, dissenters are largely ignored or dismissed as wingnuts. Certain blogs are quietly being shut down; some bloggers are banned from popular sites. Street protesters are driven back from media cameras OR are hauled off to jail. Little by little we are being silenced until the jackboot heel of government comes down squarely on our necks. Instead of lumping all Americans into one negative category (and thus perpetuate the “ugly American” picture) why not SUPPORT and ENCOURAGE dissenting Americans.
Peace to you Worried American - what makes you think we have the time to do as you ask? It is our people who are being boiled alive in a tide of blood not yours. In such a case one looks to save and feed one’s own family and people first. You say that:
You must give us leave to disagree. We live daily with the results both of the actions of Americans and with the failure of Americans to act. I have difficulty believing the “many, many” part of what you write. (’Though doubtless you mean what you have written and believe it sincerely.) I have but to look around me, and to remember the fact that aged 17 that America has waged war on my country and my people for the entirety of my life. There has LITERALLY not been even one day of my life that your people have not been waging war against mine.
Then I look at the statistics for here.
On a typical day we get a little less than 2,000 unique visits from machines whose I.P. addresses are in the United States of America. Let me put that into context for you.
Less than 2% of our readership is American.
The overwhelming majority of our readers - more than 90% - come from the Middle East and Asia in particular from the Dar al-Islam - those lands ruled by Muslims and where Muslims are a majority. Those are the people we want to reach, those are the people that those who started the group of people from those lands traditionally in the West thought of as “Catholic” and their friends and brothers and sisters in humanity who were Muslims living in Lebanon and Irak set out to reach, those are the people we are reaching and our traffic is growing.
The remainder of our readership comes from Europe, Canada, the Countries of South and Central America, and some from Australia and New Zealand. Adding together all the visits from the English-Speaking countries just over 3% of our readership comes from people who live in English-speaking lands. Expressed as a percentage of their population we get three times the number of readers from Canada that we get from America.
When I see “many, many” Americans actually doing something about their disagreement with what their country is doing to my people I will start to believe what you say. Until then I must sadly conclude that those few Americans who care enough to actually do something to stop their country from brutally raping mine are a tiny, tiny minority.
As to encouraging that tiny minority - by all means and we try do so when we can, that does not mean that we delude ourselves about how few they are. Also please read again what I wrote above about priorities. For the record:
In the time since he wrote that my father saw my elder brother killed, my father himself was blown to pieces in the Arbaeen massacres, my mother died of her wounds from the same attack the next day, my younger brother was wounded in the same attack, the attack in which he saw our father blown to pieces and and our mother set on fire by the bomb and then die of the burns she received, he together with my sister and I was then injured in another bombing.
What makes you think that we or any other Iraki have any interest in America or Americans? The overwhelming majority of your people clearly have no interest in the barbarism that the death squad in uniform that they praise as “America’s finest” who must be “supported” and praised for their “sacrifice” at all times inflict upon us every day that they remain here. It is no matter to the overwhelming majority of Americans what is done to us. This may come as surprise to you:
America is not the centre of the world and you are most certainly not the “shining city on the hill”.
When it comes to those peoples who look or believe differently to yours and who are also unfortunate enough to live in a country that has something America covets America and its people have never been the “shining city on the hill” you have instead in your words been noble and in your acts been darkness made visible, malignant, and potent.
To discover what people are really like you should examine what they do not what they say.
This site is not about America, or Americans, not even the tiny minority of “good” Americans such as my sister in humanity Siun, or my brother in humanity Michael, or even, perhaps, you.
It is about my people and their suffering at the hands of America, it is about what the overwhelming majority of the American people and their government have done and continue to do, to mine.