Listening to Iraqi voices when hearing about Iraq

My weekly Guardian column:

Since last week’s… victories… by the militant group Isis against a weak, US-backed, Iraqi government, the same, failed protagonists from the 2003 invasion have come out of the woodwork to advocate another… military intervention.
Although some journalists, like The Independent’s… prescient… Patrick Cockburn, have been warning about the… growing power… of Isis, voices on the ground are few and far between in western media. Mostly we get the same old neo-cons who took us to Iraq in the first place.
That’s a shame, because local reporters and bloggers have a unique perspective. Instead of listening to think-tanks… pushing… to bomb, a tour through the internet turns up plenty of thoughts from those suffering the direct consequences of the carnage in Iraq.
Niqash… is a website that features Iraqi journalists from across the nation and publishes in Arabic, Kurdish and English. Reporter Abdul-Khaleq Dosky this week… interviewed… Bashar al-Kiki, the Kurdish head of the provincial council in Ninawa, and asked him about life inside Mosul since it fell to Isis.
“The whole of Mosul is under Isis’ control,” al-Kiki explained. “Isis has also allocated one mosque in the city for… tawba… [repentance or confession]. People are expected to go this mosque to repent past acts and to show their loyalty to Isis.”
Mustafa Habib‘s analysis of the retreat from Mosul is fascinating: he argues that the Iraqi army didn’t desert, but was ordered to leave. It remains unclear by whom but he quotes Hakim al-Zamily, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s security and defence committee, who says:

“There can only be a handful of people who know who actually gave those orders for the army to withdraw. One of them must be al-Maliki [the Iraqi prime minister.] But up until now he’s said nothing about this.”

Users of social media in Iraq have been perennially… blocked… by the government. Many Iraqis outside the country have been tweeting about their families trapped in Mosul. Iraqi blogger Maryam Al Dabbagh, now in the UAE, has an essential… Twitter feed… with moving details about life under Isis control.
The absence of Iraqi voices on the plight of their own country isn’t a new phenomenon. One of the most articulate Iraqi bloggers, Baghdad Burning, moved from Iraq to Syria after 2003 and is now in another Arab city. Her last post,… in April 2013, was full of anger about the fate of her homeland:

“We learned that you can be floating on a sea of oil, but your people can be destitute. Your city can be an open sewer; your women and children can be eating out of trash dumps and begging for money in foreign lands.”

Kurdish journalist Fazel Hawramy runs a good… Twitter account… on Iraq, and has been… reporting… for The Guardian. Then there’s Isis, which is mounting its own social media campaign. Ironically, there is also an… apparent Isis critic… tweeting from within the group.
Of course, many Iraqis don’t use social networks at all. In any modern war it’s dangerous to take Facebook posts and Tweets as representing anything more than the views of a select few. Journalism from the streets still remains vitally important.
We should also ask why western reporters are taken to be the most trusted authorities wherever they are reporting. An… anonymous journalist, writing from Mosul last week, explained in Niqash that the Baath Party may be making an effort to restore its power in Iraq. However, the author wrote:

“It was still clear who was really in charge: Isis. The same source in Mosul said that after gaining control of the whole province of Ninawa, ISIS then gave the Naqshbandi Army [militias linked to the Baathists] 24 hours to remove their pictures of Saddam Hussein.”

The Iraqi people face years more hardship and uncertainty. What the country doesn’t need is… more blowhards… looking to preserve American prestige. That was lost the day Iraq was invaded in 2003. Listening and engaging local voices has never been more important, if for no other reason to prove that Baghdad’s problems won’t be fully solved in London, Tehran, Washington or Canberra.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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