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It's a book that is bound to make you furious, terribly sad, frustrated and helpless... all at the same time. The blow-by-blow account of how the US-led occupation of Iraq has devastated the lives of ordinary Iraqis, reducing their once prosperous and proud country to a heap of rubble... nay, a heap of shattered dreams... will tug at your heartstrings and depress you no end.

Yet Baghdad Burning (Women Unlimited, Rs 350), by Riverbend, is a young woman's diary from the war zone called Iraq, and has to be read. The book is a compilation of Riverbend's (we don't know her real name, and anonymity is required when you use the harshest language when criticising Iraqi politicians and the Bush administration) writing on her blog named Baghdad Burning.

The educated, 24-year-old modern Iraqi woman takes you through the hell that life in Baghdad has become after the occupation. Beginning on August 16, 2003, she tells you how she wakes up in the nights either to the sounds of gunfire and explosions or because the electricity has gone off yet again, when the outside temperature is 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Unravelling Iraq

One of the greatest assets of this book is that it unravels for the rest of the world one of the richest and oldest civilisations in the world, disproving every notion that the US and its allies sought to create about Iraq before, during and after the attack. As you enter the middle-class home of a fairly affluent Iraqi family — it possesses a car, washing machine, computer, TV, heating, etc — the first myth about Iraqi women being uneducated and orthodox is demolished. Riverbend works for a computer company, wears modern western clothes, no hijab, and yet is intensely proud of not only her roots and culture, but also her religion.

Of course, she takes pains to make it clear to the readers of her blog, most of them westerners and many Americans who send e-mails supporting the war, that for what is happening in Iraq — the move towards fundamentalism, introduction of Islamic law, etc — it is not Islam that is to be blamed but the political and religious leaders hankering after power.

She has nothing but contempt for Iraq's Governing Council selected by the Coalition Provisional Authority led by Paul Bremer in 2003; "puppet show" she calls it. Her favourite, of course, is Ahmed Chalabi. "This guy is a real peach. He is the head of the Iraqi National Congress and heavily backed by the Pentagon. He was a banker who embezzled millions from the Petra Bank in Jordan. My favourite part of his life story is how he escaped from Jordan in the trunk of a car. A modern-day Cleopatra, if you will."

Life amidst shelling and explosions

Page after page, entry after entry, Riverbend takes you through a terrifying journey of life in the midst of shelling and explosions, raids and abductions, humiliation and arrests or plain disappearance of loved ones. The blogger tells us with chilling clarity how the war on Iraq has nothing to do with terrorism and is all about oil, and the huge profits big corporations would make in reconstructing what was deliberately destroyed. She tells us how before the war a litre of unleaded gasoline cost just one cent and how the queues for fuel were getting longer and longer in a country with huge oil reserves.

She is furious that slowly but surely the reins of government were being passed on to Iraqis who had lived outside the country. In the midst of the chaos and confusion, fear of the midnight knock or a bomb exploding on her house, she also has entries that make you smile. Like when she relates the story of her aunt who is visiting from London ("My uncle wasn't a political refugee or a double agent... or anything glamorous... just a man who had decided to live his life in England") is terrified to see a tank on their street. Dreading a raid she makes Riverbend and her cousin wear all her gold jewellery on their person, hidden beneath clothes. "I sat listening to the night and trying to sleep around the jewellery, thinking of all the pictures of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe sleeping in diamonds and emeralds. At 3 a.m. I decided I wasn't Elizabeth Taylor, took off the rings and bracelets and stuffed them in my pillowcase."

But the smiles are few and far between. As the book progresses, the images get grimmer; one particular midnight raid on a neighbour's house where the young daughter-in-law, who normally wears a hijab, is pulled out of the house and made to stand shivering in a short nightie, is heartrending. The woman's total humiliation comes through powerfully in this account.

Expectedly the Abu Ghraib prison abuse enrages Riverbend. "Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places... seeing the pictures simply made it all more real and tangible... Somehow pictures of dead Iraqis are easier to bear than this grotesque show of American military technique. People would rather be dead than sexually abused and degraded by the animals running Abu Ghraib prison," says her entry on the event.

Commentary on Iraqi women

Baghdad Burning is also a very passionate commentary on the equal rights that Iraqi women had enjoyed prior to the occupation. Riverbend takes great pains to explain how the veil or burqa, quite common in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, was hardly ever worn by Iraqi women. She disputes an article published in the New York Times quoting an expert that in many West Asian countries girls marry their cousins, who force them to wear the veil. Maintaining that many Muslim women wear a veil or hijab for religious reasons and because they feel comfortable and secure donning them, she says, "Attacking hijab would be the equivalent of attacking a Christian's right to wear a cross, or a Jew's right to wear a yarmulke."

Livid at a women's rights discussion on Al Jazeerah where it was claimed that for 30 years girls in Iraq had remained illiterate and uneducated because only the Ba'athist girls were allowed to go to school, Riverbend says: "I wasn't a Ba'athist and got accepted into one of the best colleges in the country based on my grades. None of my friends were Ba'athist and they ended up pharmacists, doctors, dentists, translators and lawyers."

She adds that the Shiite clergy crowding positions of power in occupied Iraq did not augur well for women and the chaotic conditions under which they lived made mothers pull out daughters from colleges. When the blogger tries to persuade a neighbour not to do so she snapped "what she was supposed to do with her daughter's college degree if anything happened to her. `Hang it on her tombstone with the consolation that my daughter died for a pharmaceutical degree? She can sit this year out'."

This is a comprehensive account no journalist could have provided on the hell that Iraq became after the war and won the Lettre Ulysses Award for Literary Reportage 2005. The book contains entries only till 2004. Written in a chatty style, with humour, wit, irony, analysis and sarcasm on the ignorance of westerners about what Iraq really was, sans any kind of terrorists for whom it has now become a haven, it is a record of history for which posterity will be grateful.

On Saddam's execution

If you wonder what she had to say on Saddam's execution, here is her entry on December 31, 2006 (http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com): "Maliki and his people are psychopaths. It's outrageous — an execution during Eid. Muslims all over the world (with the exception of Iran) are outraged. Eid is a time of peace, of putting aside quarrels and anger. This does not bode well for the coming year. No one imagined the madmen would actually do it during a religious holiday. We thought we'd at least get a few days of peace and some time to enjoy the Eid holiday, which coincides with the New Year this year. We've spent the first two days of a holy holiday watching bits and pieces of a sordid lynching.

"America the saviour! After nearly four years and Bush's biggest achievement in Iraq has been a lynching. Bravo Americans.

"And no — not the celebrations BBC is claiming. With the exception of a few areas, the streets are empty. Now we come to CNN. Shame on you CNN journalists — you're getting lazy. The least you can do is get the last words correct when you write a story about an execution. Your articles are read the world over and will go down in history as references. You people are the biggest news network in the world — the least you can do is spend some money on a decent translator. Saddam's last words were NOT "Muqtada Al Sadr". If anyone had seen at least part of the video they showed on TV, you'd know that."

Summing up 2006, she is "sad, not for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We've all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago." Four years ago, she sympathised at the death of American soldiers, as they too were human. But "today they simply represent numbers. Three thousand Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That's the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue. Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he's wanted to marry for the last six years? I don't think so."

Memorable quotes

On hate mails: It's great to get questions and differing opinions but please be intelligent about it. If I want to hear what Fox News has to say, I'll watch it.

On April 9 as the new Iraqi National Day (the day Baghdad fell): That day was a nightmare beyond anyone's power to describe. Baghdad was up in smoke — explosions everywhere, American troops crawling all over the city, fire, looting, fighting, and killing... Baghdad was full of death and destruction. Seeing tanks in your city, under any circumstances, is perturbing. Seeing foreign tanks in your capital is devastating.

On George W. Bush: I can't watch him for more than a minute at a time — I hate him that much. He makes me sick. He stands there, squinting his eyes and pursing his lips, going on and on with such blatant lies. And he looks just plain stupid. I listened for as long as I could tolerate his inane features and grating voice, then turned off the television.

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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