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Updated 19 March 2023

Image source, Daily Mirror Gulf coverage

Fires burned around Saddam Hussein's Council of Ministers building during the first wave of attacks in March 2003

The bombs that lit up the night skies of Iraq in March 2003 were described by military powers in the west as "shock and awe".

It marked the start of the US and UK-led invasion of the country and the removal of leader Saddam Hussein.

The British public were told Iraq had, and was developing, weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the UK and its allies.

Thirteen years later, Sir John Chilcot's inquiry into the war found intelligence "had not established beyond doubt either that Saddam Hussein had continued to produce chemical and biological weapons or that efforts to develop nuclear weapons continued".

Now, 20 years on, some of those involved in the war, or directly affected by it, look back on the conflict and consider its legacy.

'War cost me my son'

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'My son died in a hell-hole in Iraq'

On 24 June 2003, three months after the initial invasion, L/Cpl Thomas Keys from Llanuwchllyn, near Bala in Gwynedd, was killed near Amara in south-east Iraq when British Military Police were attacked by a mob of Iraqi civilians in a dispute over British patrols in the area.

Tom's father, Reg Keys, said his son and his fellow soldiers were sent into a "hell hole" with "no working radio, no satellite phone, no flares, no morphine, no grenades and just 50 rounds of ammunition".

Mr Keys would come to believe the UK had been taken to war on a false pretence and hoped in his heart "that one day the prime minister may be able to say sorry".

Born of two worlds

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Welsh-Iraqi Hussein Said says the racism he endured during the war made him hate Wales for a time

Having an Iraqi father and a Welsh mother proved to be a confusing time for Hussein Said.

Only 10 years old, he found himself targeted by schoolyard bullies and said the racism he experienced made him "hate" Wales for a time.

"It was something I found difficult to reconcile - that Iraq/Wales identity".

'We went to war on a lie'

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Iraq War based on lies, minister claims

Lord Peter Hain was a member of Tony Blair's cabinet at the time and the former Secretary of State for Wales now regrets his decision to vote for the war.

"I believed the intelligence, because it was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and I knew he'd used them [before].

"And tragically, that intelligence was shown to be completely false. And so we went to war on a lie."

'We didn't change a lot'

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"There were a lot of things wrong about it," says Lee West two decades after the invasion

Lee West, from Swansea, signed up for the Royal Marines in 2002 and found himself deployed to Iraq three years after UK military involvement should have ended.

"We were in the transition phase for the country where, yes, Saddam had gone, but how's the country now going to operate?"

Twenty years on, Lee has mixed feelings about the outcome: "It was, yes, successful, and we did a lot of things, changed a lot of things within what we were asked to do, but in the grand scheme we didn't change a lot."

The soldiers sent to war

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Soldier Liam Spillane has doubt over the war's success

Liam Spillane joined the Army in 1999 and was deployed to Iraq in 2005 - despite trying to be "that approachable soldier" for Iraqis, dangers on the ground played on his mind.

"I remember one night I thought I'd had a dream. I dreamt that I was alone on a patrol and I was calling out, 'don't leave me, I'm all alone.'

"It turns out that I'd actually woken up shouting 'don't leave me' and things like that, and it was really, really scary."

When UK troops left Iraq in 2009, more than 200 British citizens and 150,000 Iraqis had died, with more than one million people displaced.

Mr Keys believes the war was a mistake: "We didn't need to go to war with Iraq. It was a war of option, not necessity.

"It [war] has to be the last and final option. When all other avenues have failed. But with Iraq it was almost a first option."

See more here:
The Iraq War: Five voices from Wales, 20 years on - BBC

Baghdad, Iraq Haj Mohammed al-Khashali has outlived four sons and one grandson, killed together when a car bomb tore through Mutanabbi Street in 2007.

Sixteen years later, and 20 years after the United States-led invasion of his country, 89-year-old Haj Mohammed is still serving tea in the Shabandar coffee house, on the corner of the historic street he first encountered as a child running along it towards the Tigris River.

Back then, it was not yet known as the Booksellers Street, but everyone knew of the 10th-century Arab poet Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi who wrote of war, courage, and love whom it was named after in 1932, during the reign of King Faisal I.

Little did al-Khashali know back then that he was running past the building housing his future coffee shop, which had been standing since 1904 and functioning as a coffee shop since 1917.

Observing his customers from behind his old wooden desk earlier this month, al-Khashali recalled the academic meet-ups of the 1960s, after he began renting the property in 1963, and Shabandar played host to political debates over tea and packs of cards.

The walls of Shabandar are lined with photographs of prominent politicians from an earlier time and the framed faces of al-Khashalis four sons and grandchild, who were among the 30 people killed in the March 2007 suicide attack on the street outside. He has three surviving children, one son and two daughters.

When I was young, photography was my hobby, I loved pictures. When the explosion damaged the building in 2007, I had the archives of all the photos, so I printed them again, he explains. Despite the pain, I promised myself after the explosion that I would renovate this place.

But during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that overthrew former president Saddam Hussein, and the resultant sectarian conflict, Mutanabbi Street was not spared the violence as armed groups resisted the invasion and then fought each other.

By the time the US declared the end of its mission in Iraq and withdrew in December 2011, between 110,000 and 120,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed, according to the Iraq Body Count project.

That number has gone up to at least 200,000 civilians and 288,000 Iraqis in total including combatants who have died violently in the 20 years since 2003, the project says, as the country faced devastating challenges, including the rise of armed groups. Today, the United Nations says nearly one-third of Iraqs 42 million population lives in poverty.

I lost four of my children because of what happened after 2003, and its still an open scar in my heart that wont heal, al-Khashali says, as a bulbul shifts nearby in a wooden birdcage suspended from the ceiling. They took down one dictator and implemented many others, he says, referring to the persistent political challenges and corruption that have plagued the country.

Kadhim had not been to Mutanabbi Street much since 2003, but had come from Erbil, the capital of northern Iraqs semi-autonomous Kurdish region, where she has lived since 2014, to see what the street looked like after recent renovations.

In the 1970s, I worked at the general automotive company, and I used to visit this street with my colleagues every day after work, she remembers. I felt different when I walked in [today]; I didnt feel the historical identity of the place any more.

Many of the booksellers on Mutanabbi recall the invasion and occupation. Jaafar Karim, 69, opened his business on the street in 1992, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and at the beginning of a decade of sanctions.

There is a vast difference between Mutanabbi pre-2003 and Mutanabbi post-2003, especially in the freedom of writing and publishing, he says. Now there is more freedom in acquiring books and no censorship or ban on books.

A neighbouring bookshop owner, Mohammed al-Kutubi, agrees, even amid growing fears among some of a clampdown on freedom of speech including the recent sentencing of six people to prison for social media usage deemed by a governmental committee to be indecent, and the increasing role of religion in politics most recently evident in the passing of a law banning the import of alcohol.

During the sectarian war, it was difficult to reach the street at times, and we faced threats from extremists, he adds, rearranging his books. A lot of my colleagues died in the 2007 explosion.

Both the booksellers and locals are less pleased with the recent renovations of the street. Paid for by a donation from the Central Bank of Iraq and the Iraqi Private Banks League, work, including redoing the street and pavements in stone, installing a new lighting system, and painting the buildings on the main street, began in August 2021 and ended three months later at a cost of $3m, according to Omar al-Handal, representative director of Baghdad-based construction company Diamond Loft.

We restored the buildings as they used to be, al-Handal says. It was a deserted, dark area full of stray dogs and now there is life, he said.

Look at this! Its paint, its not the authentic colour of the bricks, bookshop manager Nabil Ali laughs, pointing at the graceful walls of the Baghdadi Cultural Center that hugs the bank of the Tigris beside the Mutanabbi statue. The 11th-century building with its courtyards and arched walkways has been through a number of incarnations since it was built as a stunning palace for Abbasid Caliph al-Mustazhir Billah, serving as an Ottoman archive, then a military school and then a civil court, before the governorate rehabilitated it after it was vandalised during the invasion.

But 65-year-old Ali is more concerned about rising costs. Locals say the improvements have led to increased rents, making their livelihoods ever more untenable in a country of rising exchange rates, dinar devaluations and endemic corruption.

The building owner doubled my rent because the street has become a magnet to visitors until late hours, says one bookshop owner, Baraa al-Bayati.

Inside another of Mutanabbis stores, a 50-year-old man, who refused to share his name, said: How would I describe how the street has changed in the past 20 years? How would I describe Iraq? No education, no health system, and no infrastructure.

He lights a cigarette. I cried when I saw American troops entering Baghdad, and I was surprised to see some people welcoming them with flowers!

If Mutanabbi Street is the face of Baghdad today, it is a complex picture. For some, the street is a symbol of a new and wealthier country, ripe for investment; for others, it is a place of loss, and a memory of a more cosmopolitan city yet to return. They long for a past they understood.

Saddam was a dictator, but I think it was the most effective way to run a country like Iraq, the man continues. What is democracy? And what do we gain out of it in these 20 years? Nothing. Just corruption, killing and destruction.

Link:
Mutanabbi Street slowly re-emerges, 20 years on from Iraq war - Al Jazeera English

Military

Report says UK armed service has major questions to answer about conduct in war against Islamic State

Thu 23 Mar 2023 10.54 EDT

Twenty-nine civilians are feared to have been killed in nine RAF airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between 2016 and 2018, 10 more than previous estimates, and far higher than the single non-combatant fatality accepted by the UK, according to analysis.

In the worst incident, 12 civilians were accepted as likely to have been killed in Raqqa, Syria in 2017 by a US strike, while research points to an RAF drone strike killing at least four member of the same family in Abu Kamal, Syria, in 2016, according to on-the-ground reports.

The reports authors, the London-based charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), says the analysis showed the RAF had major questions to answer about the conduct of the war against Islamic State (IS), but the Ministry of Defence insisted there was no evidence of civilian casualties.

Earlier this week, a Guardian investigation identified six RAF airstrikes in Mosul, Iraq, that killed civilians during same period as that covered by the analysis. The latest data also examined British bombing in Syria as part of Operation Shader, the UK contribution to the war against IS that began nearly nine years ago.

RAF Typhoon jets launched an attack on 13 August 2017, purportedly against enemy fighters operating mortars. Syrian media reported there had been up to 12 civilians killed a figure subsequently accepted by the US Central Command, which has overall responsibility for the campaign against the terrorist group.

US Central Command released a statement, acknowledging dozens of civilian casualties, mostly from US strikes, but also referenced the attack on Raqqa by date. Regrettably, 12 civilians were unintentionally killed and six were unintentionally injured as a result of the blast, it stated.

The RAF claims to have only caused a single civilian fatality in the fight against IS during the bombing of a group of terrorists in a vehicle in March 2018 in Syrias Euphrates Valley. However, concerns about that assertion have lingered for several years after US admissions and other leaks. The US says 1,437 civilians have been unintentionally killed in 35,000 airstrikes.

The RAF is an integral part of the campaign against IS. MPs voted for RAF participation in strikes against targets in Iraq in September 2014 and Syria in December 2015, with jets and drones having flown more than 5,500 combat missions and fired more than 4,300 missiles.

Dr Iain Overton, the executive director of AOAV, said delayed or incomplete reporting made it difficult for independent groups to assess the impact of British airstrikes. However, he said, the research showed there are some major questions that the RAF should answer in relation to civilian harm from its airstrike missions, questions that all too often are ignored and rejected.

Britain says it takes reports of civilian casualties very seriously. An MoD spokesperson added: The UK always minimises the risk of civilian casualties through our rigorous processes and carefully examines a range of evidence to do this, including comprehensive analysis of the mission data for every strike.

Two Reaper drones struck targets in Abu Kamal, Syria, on 21 April 2016 using Hellfire missiles that were aimed at an improvised weapons factory and car bomb.

At least four and up to 10 members of one family were killed when their house was targeted, said Airwars, a research group that monitors western bombing in the war on IS. Its estimate is based on a compilation of reports from Syrian media.

At the time of the strike, the RAF said there was no indication of any civilian casualties in our own detailed assessments of the incident. However, the research concluded that the weight of local reporting led to the conclusion that the RAF were responsible, or, at the very least, involved in the targeting which led to civilian casualties.

Although the research focused on a two-year period ending in 2018, questions remain about RAF airstrikes. Earlier this month, it emerged that the MoD was refusing to say whether it had investigated reports of civilian casualties after an RAF drone strike against a terrorist target in northern Syria in December.

The fresh analysis of strike data was taken from combining assessments made by the US, internal Pentagon data leaked to the New York Times, analyses from Airwars and reports from international and local media.

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RAF airstrikes killed 29 civilians in Iraq and Syria in two years, analysis suggests - The Guardian

March 19 (Reuters) - Talks between French oil major TotalEnergies(TTEF.PA) and Iraq to resolve sticking points in a long-delayed $27 billion energy deal "have reached advanced stages", Iraqi oil minister Hayan Abdel-Ghani said on Sunday.

"We will activate the deal very soon," Abdel-Ghani said at an energy event.

The proposed deal, which Baghdad hopes will revive foreign investment in the country, was signed in 2021 for TotalEnergies to build four oil, gas and renewables projects with an initial investment of $10 billion in southern Iraq over 25 years.

However, disputes between Iraqi politicians over the terms of the deal.

Iraq's demand for a 40% share in the project is a key sticking point while TotalEnergies wants a majority stake, sources told Reuters.

Asked if the issue of Iraq's share in the project was resolved, Abdel-Ghani said: "It's not the time to discuss the shares and we will announce them when an agreement is reached."

Abdel-Ghani also said that Iraq is committed to maintaining its 220,000 barrel per day (bpd) oil output cut in line with its quota under the latest OPEC+ agreement.

The country is also ready to increase production if required to do so by producer group OPEC+.

"We obliged some oil companies operating in the south to cut production to come in line with OPEC+'s agreed rates," he added.

Reporting by Moayed KenanyWriting by Ahmed Rasheed and Hatem MaherEditing by David Goodman

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Go here to see the original:
Iraq in final stages of talks on $27 billion TotalEnergies deal, says ... - Reuters

ali hamdani

It looked more and more real that this is it. It is happening. In fact, I had a to-do list that was almost impossible to achieve, of preparing for the war.

What did the list say?

[CHUCKLES]:: That list said, starting with grocery-shopping, canned food, grains, fuel, kerosene, up to digging an actual well in your garden.

Operation Iraqi Freedom. The attack came in waves cruise missiles, followed by the F-117 stealth bombers, with so-called bunker-busting bombs.

[EXPLOSIONS]

Its the night that everybody was anticipating. Weve had all these conversations. Were staying, were staying, were going to, you know, weather it. Were going to stay here our home, our resources, our network of people. Were not going anywhere.

Then, the siren kicks in. My sister started panicking. My mother seemed very scared. And here, I realized this is my very small window to actually take them out of this mess.

I decided, OK, all the food we got in the car. Everything we need in the car. IDs, documents, everything, all the cash we had in the car, immediately.

And then, we drove. Its about 180 kilometers west of Baghdad.

And we find a small apartment through my brother-in-laws contacts and family members. They secure an apartment for us, and we stay there. But I had two Great Dane dogs that I had to leave behind, with some food and some water, because they were too big to take with us in the car.

So I established a routine of driving back every other day to feed the dogs and refill the water. They were not even my dogs. They were my brothers dogs. And when he left the country, I was like, I am counting on you to look after them. And this is something in me, that I dont like to let people down.

I know that about you.

[ALI CHUCKLES]

I didnt know what was waiting for me. What am I heading into? What are the risks? Working with foreigners, that is, like, an immediate death sentence with certain groups, because youre looked at as the collaborator, the spy.

My family, of course, didnt want me to do it. They were like, no, no, screw it. No money, no nothing is worth it. Stay here with us and be safe. And that was just not me. I thought, I will be doing something more important by joining the media.

You thought you were going to be doing something more important than being a doctor by being with the media. What did that mean for you at that time? What was that important thing that you thought you were going to be doing?

I thought I would have a chance at actually telling the true story. Youve seen the fog of war. Theres so much blabbering going on, so many inaccuracies. And of course, truth gets buried in the process.

And let me tell you, from an Iraqi perspective. Because we were sitting, back then in Baghdad, listening to all the allegations of WMDs and ties to al-Qaeda and 9/11. And for us, this was a sad joke.

Because we knew that the Iraqi army didnt have a functioning tank, barely had a rifle that could fire a few bullets before exploding. And the ties to al-Qaeda give me a break. Saddam would never have allowed any other group to claim power or to seek power. And it was so frustrating for us as Iraqis yes, we wanted to get rid of Saddam, but not based on a false-flag operation like the invasion.

Let me ask you this. I have, literally, no recollection of when we first met. Do you have a do you know when we first met?

Yes, in a car, in a moving car. We stopped very quickly. You jumped in, in a very Lulu fashion.

And James introduced you. I

Was Yasser driving the car?

Yes, yes. Yasser was driving the car.

Yasser was the driver that we were very close to, and I still remember his laugh in my head someone we all loved very much. Can you, for people who may not understand, what was a typical day like for us?

I mean, I remember I would be dressed in my abaya, my robe. You would tell me to pretend I was mute, in case we got stomped. Because I look Iraqi, but I certainly dont sound Iraqi. I guess every day what I remember is that every day was very different.

Well, we dont really what is happening at the moment. All the press is assembled there, but they have not been led into the actual chamber where Saddam Hussein is tried. So we dont really know what

You would be meeting, maybe, a top official one day, and another day, youd be rushing towards a bombing.

Well, it was a double bombing. It happened near the center of town, near a bridge that leads to the green zone, which is the seat

Yes, a typical day in Iraq back then was anything but. There was nothing typical about it. But let me tell you about that abaya and the hijab. That was my favorite attire for you. [LULU LAUGHS]

And I always wished that in my head, I was like, can we just leave James behind, please, with his blond hair and blue eyes?

Well, do you remember when he dyed his hair black and he looked like Elvis? Yeah.

Uh, he did, and it made it actually even worse, because it looked comical and attracted more attention. It didnt look real. It looked so funny.

And we were doing that, of course, because if youre in a car, you just dont want to attract attention from anybody, and you want to look like you belong there. And having a foreigner in the car, of course, is a problem.

Yes. One thing that I may have not always conveyed perfectly, I would say, is how much people resented your presence in the country, how much people, literally, hated foreigners, because they associated them with the invasion. And when I say that, of course, youre aware of all the groups that targeted journalists, but Im telling you, even the closest people to me, even the people who are educated, the people who know that you are there just to do journalism even those people resented your existence.

But of course I always had to find the balance between keeping you safe and aware of your basically, situationally, aware, but also not to demoralize you by telling you how much people hated your existence.

It is very complicated and sometimes puts me at risk of being seen as the collaborator. And I would wake up in the morning. I would deliberately go to work different time of the day every day. I will take a different route, because we knew that some groups were watching.

So if someone spotted me or seen me with foreigners, then that is it. That is the end of it. And I remember a very funny now, its funny, it wasnt back then incident where one morning, I was leaving home, and I saw one of my neighbors who waved me down and [INAUDIBLE]..

And he goes, are you going to work? I instinctively said, yes, I am, because I was. And he goes, great. Because my son has an X-ray appointment at Baghdad hospital. I need to take him there. Can you please give us a ride?

Oh.

And of course, I wasnt heading there. Of course, I was heading to the media compound. So he jumps in the car, and we drive completely the opposite side of town. I drop him off. As soon as he leaves, I rush back to the office. Of course, James was sitting there, waiting, asking where the hell have I been. And that was the story of my life the double life I lived because of this job.

That must have been really, actually confusing.

Yeah, its its an identity crisis of some sort. And who am I, and how long will this last for? But remember, there was no clear

End in sight.

way out, yeah, of it.

Ali, I think about and thought about the risk to you a lot. And I think one of the moments where that really hit home was in the moments where you actually saved our lives. You know, James got kidnapped in Sadr City. Thats a Shiite area in Baghdad. It was overrun at the time by militia members.

How do you remember that day?

I was going to say, when you said, the moment you saved our lives, I was going to say, which one?

But that was part of my job, or my commitment, to be honest. And I remember that very clear.

We get stopped by two cars filled with gunmen, who jumped out. They started yelling and screaming and shouting at us, pointing their AK 47 towards us. We step outside the car, and I start hearing them saying, only the foreigner, [SPEAKING ARABIC] which means, foreigner, in Arabic.

And then, I realized that I had a choice to make. I can just let them take James, and here I am, safe and sound, and I can leave.

Or I can help James. Then in a split second, I realized James chances of survival were almost zero.

And without me helping translating, James would be clueless of what was going on. So I immediately started yelling, Im with him. Im with him. And they kept saying, just the foreigner.

I jumped into the kidnappers car. And I kept saying, Im with him, Im with him. Take me. Im with him. And I ended up sitting in Jamess lap, actually, because the car was so crowded. At least some fun funny moment in that not-so-funny situation.

And Yasser followed you in his car. He also

Yes.

put himself in harms way.

Absolutely. Yasser, instead of just driving away, as he was instructed he goes, no, no, no, no, Im also with them. Im coming. So I immediately started talking to them and reassuring them, Im just an ordinary Iraqi. And then, I tried to, basically, psychologically manipulate them into thinking Im on their side.

And after many hours, they eventually let you go. And I think the story about this, for me, is just how unbelievably brave you were. Did you think, like, why are these people here

Oh, trust me, I asked this question every day. Why are they here? Its so much nicer on the other side of the world. Just go away, go live your lives. You dont have to be here. And actually, that brings me to a question to you. Why were you there in the first place?

I mean, I dont know that I asked myself that question then. I think 20 years on, I ask myself that question a lot now. And Ive come up with a different answer now than I had then.

I would say I believe that we were really there to tell the story of this country, to make sure the real story got out, that when the government of America would say everything was going great, we were there to say that it was a catastrophe. I felt that it was, on balance, important.

And I was also willing to put my life on the line for that. But as you know, I ended up getting PTSD quite seriously. It started at these multiple bombings in Karbala very early on in the war, when I was in the crowd there, and all of a sudden, these suicide bombers started detonating their vests.

And there were so many people, that the bombs acted like meat grinders. And I remember running through the crowd and seeing these pools of blood and the chaos and the fear. And it broke something in me, and over the course of the war, that only got worse.

Did you have something like that at all?

Of course. If I didnt, then probably, theres something wrong with me. In fact, it is something that we Iraqis always joke about that if youre an Iraqi with no PTSD, there is something wrong with you. But maybe it manifested differently.

Because for you as a foreign journalist, when you come to Iraq, you know that youre leaving after, lets say, six weeks, eight weeks, or however long youre going to stay. For someone like me, this is where I am. This is where Im going to be.

And it is different. It is like that boiling frog effect, where you dont really sense the water boiling. You just keep adapting. But at a huge cost, though. Because this is not normal.

So it does break something in you, but differently. Because for you, you know that you can go out of it and seek, maybe, help. For someone like me, there is no way out. You have to deal with it.

But finally, something did happen, where you kind of broke. I never saw you as wrecked as when the assassination attempt happened in 2008. I wasnt there for that, but you were there with a colleague of mine, Ivan Watson.

NPRs Ivan Watson and a team from our Baghdad Bureau were reminded of that yesterday.

Residents say Rabia Street was once one of the prettiest places in Baghdad, a boulevard of boutiques

What happened on that day?

Yeah. That day started like any other day. We were reporting, ironically, on how the security situation in West Baghdad has been improving. And we were sitting with a restaurant owner, talking to him about how the situation is improving, and whether it is or not.

RPGs were everywhere in the street, and gunmen were everywhere, clashes, regularly.

Mojud invited us in for lunch.

And as we concluded our conversation and walked out, we hear people running and screaming at us, saying, stay back, car bomb. Car bomb.

Iraqi Army Lieutenant Mohammed

So we I remember, we hunkered down from just [INAUDIBLE] away from our our car.

[EXPLOSION]

[BLEEP]

And then, our own car explodes.

Its in our car!

Its our car. They put a sticky bomb in our car.

Wow.

Later on, we figured that apparently, what had happened is someone passed by our car and stuck what was called a magnet bomb back then

Sticky bomb.

A sticky bomb, yeah. Im sorry, sticky bomb. You can tell its been 20 years now.

Anyway, so they were trying to kill me and the rest of the crew, because we were foreigners. We were collaborators. We were considered the infidels.

And at that moment, I felt how real it was.

Later on, we went to the wreckage of the car. And I looked at my backpack. It was completely burnt. And the recording device that I left behind. And I was thinking, this was supposed to be me.

So in my head, I was like, when is it ever going to stop, though? And when is the time for me to say, this is it, Ive done my part? And that was, to me, the cutoff moment. I didnt want to be that boiling frog anymore.

This brings me to something, which is, during the worst of the civil war, I stopped going for quite a few months while I got treatment for PTSD.

Im wondering if you ever felt resentful that I could leave.

I was away when this happened. I wasnt there, because I didnt have to be. Even though I lived in Iraq and I worked in Iraq, I was able to go out when I wanted. Did that feel unfair? It must have felt unfair. It is unfair.

Unfair, yes. Maybe resentful is a big word. I would say I felt and specifically that time I remember I was on the phone with you after.

I remember.

And you were telling me, Im coming, Im coming. Im going to be there soon. And I, in my head in fact, you said, dont leave just yet, because I need to see you. I want to talk to you.

And I knew, deep in your heart, you wanted to make sure I was OK. Because like you said, we were friends. Were not just colleagues. But for the first time in my head, I was thinking, Lulu, you just dont get it. You dont get it.

Originally posted here:
Opinion | The Shameful Secret at the Heart of My War Reporting - The New York Times