Are you curious about Iraq but not sure if you can trust the White House press releases or the US media to give you a good picture? (After all, neither of them leave the Green Zone.)
If so, check out this blog from an actual Iraqi citizen living in Iraq. He appears to be risking his life to tell the world about life in this wonderful new Democracy President Bush created.
Iraqi's Blog Chronicles Daily Life of a Nation in Turmoil
April 6, 2006
In the first bloody hours after insurgents destroyed a revered Shiite shrine in Iraq in February, Baghdad dentist Zeyad A. watched his Sunni neighbors grab machine guns and cobble together roadblocks to keep out marauding Shiite gunmen. Zeyad had a different response: He booted up his computer and began blogging about what was going on.
Zeyad's blog, Healing Iraq, has become a primary source of information on Iraq's daily deterioration for readers around the world. An agnostic of Sunni descent, Zeyad has written of friends manning impromptu neighborhood-watch patrols and religious leaders being murdered and dragged through the streets by mobs. He has also posted photos of uniformed Iraqi police driving through the streets in cars emblazoned with photos of radical Shiite clerics.
Zeyad A. is one of the best read of the dozens of Iraqis who use blogs, most of them in English, to describe the minutiae of life in a country beset by unrelenting violence. With Western reporters increasingly limited in their ability to travel around Iraq, bloggers like Zeyad, the young Iraqi woman known as Riverbend, and the brothers behind the Iraq the Model site -- who were invited to the Oval Office to meet President Bush -- offer readers details of the conflict rarely available in the mainstream foreign media.
His writings also appear to resonate with Web surfers around the world. Derek Gordon of Technorati Inc., a San Francisco blog search engine, says that 348 other sites link to Zeyad's writings, ranking his Web site among the top 0.01% of the 32.3 million blogs tracked by the company.
Zeyad was an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. war but now considers it a mistaken venture likely to permanently empower religious fundamentalists. His strongly worded essays arguing that the country is on a downward slide have prompted searing debates in the comments section of his blog between supporters and critics of the war from around the world. Zeyad stopped blogging for a year because of the harsh tone of the online fights. "I was just sick of all of the arguments," he says.
Zeyad used to post his last name and a photo on the site, but security concerns led him to stop. He never writes in Baghdad Internet cafes for fear that a militant might see him writing in English and target him as a collaborator, relying instead on a satellite Internet connection to his house. He speaks with other Iraqi bloggers regularly by email but has never met most of them because of the dangers of trying to gather in one place.
