Tag: Iraq

Say hi to Mosul Eye

The AP has an incredible story about an Iraqi man named Omar Mohammed who courageously chronicled the savagery of the Islamic State as an undercover blogger, using the moniker Mosul Eye:

For nearly two years, he’d wandered the streets of occupied Mosul, chatting with shopkeepers and Islamic State fighters, visiting friends who worked at the hospital, swapping scraps of information. He grew out his hair and his beard and wore the shortened trousers required by IS. He forced himself to witness the beheadings and deaths by stoning, so he could hear the killers call out the names of the condemned and their supposed crimes.

He wasn’t a spy. He was an undercover historian and blogger. As IS turned the Iraqi city he loved into a fundamentalist bastion, he decided he would show the world how the extremists had distorted its true nature, how they were trying to rewrite the past and forge a brutal Sunni-only future for a city that had once welcomed many faiths.

Working at Mosul University when the city fell in June 2014 to the extremists, he decided to start gathering information:

By day, he chatted with Islamic State fighters and vendors, and observed. Always observed. By night, he wrote in his native Arabic and fluent English on a WordPress blog and later on Facebook and Twitter. The city turned dark, and Mosul Eye became one of the outside world’s main sources of news about the Islamic State fighters, their atrocities and their transformation of the city into a grotesque shadow of itself. The things IS wanted kept secret went to the heart of its brutal rule.

As you’d imagine, the IS thugs weren’t too happy about the Mosul Eye:

When the only Mosul residents left were fellow Sunnis, they too were not spared, according to the catalog of horrors that is Mosul Eye’s daily report. He detailed the deaths and whippings, for spying and apostasy, for failing to attend prayers, for overdue taxes. The blog attracted the attention of the fanatics, who posted death threats in the comments section.

Spoiler: he makes it out OK, but read the whole story to learn about a modern hero.

December 11, 2017 Add Comment

The Meal

Back in 2007, the Iraq War was experiencing a “surge” courtesy of the U.S. military and I was a college student sitting at a dining hall table, wondering how I could capture the political debate of the day in metaphor through a short film script. Thus, the following piece of trenchant political satire was born. The three characters in it—George, Harry, and John, creatively representing George W. Bush, Harry Reid, and John McCain—I recast as students at a dining hall table stuck in a debate that seemed quite similar to the one occurring at the same time in Washington. I recently found this in my files and just had to let the world see its genius. Get your popcorn out for:

THE MEAL

INT. CAFETERIA – DAY

Three guys are sitting at a table eating lunch. The conversation is pretty heated.

(more…)

February 12, 2015

War Is Hell

Published in the North Central Chronicle on February 8, 2008.

John Edwards is out of the race. I think he would have made a fine president. His fight against poverty and corruption did not jive well with mainstream media narratives, though they were well-publicized cornerstones of Edwards’ stump speech. But his other equally important message also failed to catch on. After voting to authorize the Iraq War in 2002, Edwards soon reversed his position on the war, and last year created a movement called “Support the Troops. End the War.”

Today, the country’s attention has become fixed on the state of the economy more than the war in Iraq. Of course, as a capitalist nation we like to know how our dollar is doing (for those less interested in current events: it’s not doing so well), but our collective mammonism has diverted our attention away from the war, where men, women, and children are being killed.

Killed. Every single day.

It is hard to fully grasp this concept. Unlike previous American wars, those holding down the home front don’t have to sacrifice anything to keep the war going. During the Civil War, families lost their only income when men served and died on bloody battlefields. During World War II, Americans rationed food and supplies, worked in munitions factories, and were drafted to topple tyranny.

But for this war, there is no draft or call to service by the president, so all we have to do is watch B-roll of chaotic Iraqi marketplaces and argue broad talking points from the comfort and safety of our computer chairs.

That is why, I would argue, the war has not been ended yet. We remain complacent and unaware of what it means to fight a war. I’ve become so desensitized to war images that it seems like no big deal, like it is a video game. I suppose we should ask the family of Spc. Richard Burress, who died two weeks ago from a roadside bomb, if his death was no big deal.

The truth is that war is hell. Soldiers know this, and politicians know how to prevent us from knowing this. They ban images of Americans being killed from appearing in media because, as we found out after the Abu Ghraib scandal, that would cause the public to realize what is actually happening and demand that something be done to stop it.

Regardless of what pundits say, it is possible to support the troops yet not support their mission. President Bush seems to do the opposite. He sends insufficient and ill-equipped troops into a situation even Vice President Cheney knew would become a “quagmire,” then fails to remedy the horrific conditions at Walter Reed hospital and others like it. Yet he said, and kept saying, that we all should support the troops, and implied that anyone who did not was a terrorist-sympathizer. So much for being the “uniter.”

Still, I support the troops. I don’t support their mission, whatever that is (the president has yet to make it clear), but I absolutely, resolutely will support the troops. I don’t have bumper stickers or American flag lapel pins to prove it, but since when did a flimsy piece of plastic indicate one’s amount of patriotism? These men and women volunteer to serve at the high risk of injury, maimedness, or death. They leave their families for weeks, months, even years, to secure and maintain order in a disorderly country while trying to avoid getting a bullet in the brain or shrapnel in the eye. They inspire me – and relieve me from fighting a war we have no business fighting.

I trust you, the (hopefully) well-informed and sensible voter, have been able to see through the malarkey the candidates have been feeding us and decide who will better determine our future in Iraq. I’m living on a prayer that our next president will at least have the gumption, like Edwards did, to support the troops and end the war.

February 7, 2008 1 Comment