Author(s): Rory McCarthy

Politics

Sent by the Guardian to cover the aftermath of the war in Iraq, foreign correspondent Rory McCarthy spent two intense years watching a nation in turmoil. As his understanding of the country grew, so did his sympathy with the dilemmas facing the Iraqi people. Yet he found that their perspective was frighteningly absent from news reports of the conflict - drowned out by the message of the American and British occupying powers. There have been many books written about journalists' tours of duty in Iraq during the war, or about Western soldiers in Iraq, or about the merit of Western foreign policy towards Iraq and the Arab world. But there has still been no definitive account of this story written from the inside. This book is an attempt to rectify that. Like Anna Funder's STASILAND or the books of Timothy Garton Ash, this is a book that captures the stories of individuals, stories that have been little heard in the West and which tell of a people trying to reckon with what has happened in their past and trying to deal with the violence and frustrations of the present. There is the survivor of one of Saddam's mass graves, and the lawyer trying to prosecute members of the Ba'arth party for human rights abuses; the female academic who has written a thesis on E.M. Forster and is now sitting on one of the fraught local councils; the Falluja businessman who treads an uneasy line between the Americans and the increasingly hostile local population; and the insurgents themselves with whom McCarthy spends several nights in a mosque. Although the narrative tells a chronological story of the years of occupation after Saddam's fall in April 2003, the landmark events, familiar from the press, are always experienced from the point of view of the Iraqis caught up in them - men and women whose views McCarthy represents with exemplary clarity. Through their lives and actions, he tries to unpick how this supposed war of liberation descended so quickly into such violent chaos and how the intentions of the invaders and the reaction of the occupied are so sharply at odds.