The forgotten war

My latest New Matilda column is about the Iraq war and the mainstream media’s inability to report perspectives other than those uttered by the US military:

Mainstream media coverage remains tied to reporting ”˜progress’ from the mouths of American reporters and American officials, most of whom remain journalistically and morally embedded. One Iraqi reporter recently wrote that Baghdad has been so thoroughly ethnically-cleansed that killings have been reduced simply because the city is largely divided. Meanwhile, the refugee crisis — over four million displaced within Iraq, the Middle East and the wider world — is largely ignored by the Western media.

Salman Hameed, a teacher evicted from the al-Hurriya area, west of Baghdad, eight months ago, told Inter Press Service in early November that:

sectarian killings are less because all the Sunnis have been evicted from mixed areas in Baghdad. All my relatives and Sunni neighbours who survived the killing campaign led by the militias under the eyes of American and Iraqi forces have fled either to Syria or to other Sunni cities.

My New Matilda archive is here.

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