Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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This is not a review of a book but the story of its author and how he came to produce a record of war. Mohamed Fadel Fahmi is a young Egyptian in his 20s who spent what he calls "four chaotic months in Kuwait and Iraq".

Baghdad Bound: An Interpreter's Chronicles of the Iraq War begins on Sunday 23 March 2003 and ends in May 2004.

Mohamed arrived in Kuwait from Canada to take up a marketing job at Kuwait University. After two months in the job he started wondering "how to refresh what had become a monotonous daily routine". War was looming ever closer and Kuwait became "the most exciting and terrifying place to be during the build up".

Like many young men he had what one might call "adventure lust" -- enough, at least, to land a job as an interpreter for Los Angeles Times correspondents and photographers. This book is the result. It is more than just a chronicle of the Iraq war, constituting a search for what lies beyond and beneath military events.

This is, in the end, the story of the journalists who covered the war in Iraq and who suffered a number of losses. Not the embedded journalists approved by the Pentagon, but the unilaterals, described by the author as "free man's daring eye on the ground". They roamed the country freely and "established [their] own rules, signs and survival techniques in order to reach the ultimate goal of duplicating the truth onto paper".

Mohamed was a crucial channel of communication between his LA crew and the Iraqis. Alongside military stories they also covered humanitarian and human interest stories. It is interesting to note that the LA Times already had six reporters and two photographers embedded with American forces in Iraq. Mohamed's "renegade" team consisted of two journalists, a photographer and himself as "the eyes and ears of the team".

The book takes us day by day through events on the battlefields and its fringes. We are taken to Safwan, Basra, Umm Qasr Port and, of course, Baghdad.

Apart from the day to day -- in fact the hour to hour -- military action, the author -- and this is a result of both his nationality and language skills -- provides the reader with an insight into the minds of Iraqis, Sunnis, Shias, Baathists, indeed of people from all walks of life, including teachers, doctors and zoo keepers. We meet with Ahmed Chalabi, who is interviewed for the LA Times and who spoke in English.

With the serious and, at times, hair-raising accounts, we get some humorous moments, like his description of the Baghdad zoo. Scores of the zoo's employees are waiting for the American civil administrator to arrive with their salaries. The state of the zoo is pathetic. Most of the animal cages are empty. The zoo, which once had over six hundred animals, now has less than 30 left, outnumbered by the staff who are queuing to receive their $20 salaries.

A similar scene is replayed at the American Girls School, reputed to be one of the best secondary schools in Baghdad. Here, again, a tall American major doles out $20 to the principal and her teachers. But while the zoo employees are thankful for the pay, the school employees remain highly critical. "It barely covers transportation costs," says the principal.

The book is described by reviewers as a "gripping account of the events of the Iraq war". Certainly it provides an insight into the ever present horror of living in fear of coalition bombs as well as the disintegrating security situation that has made life for most Iraqis a still unfolding tragedy. It is, as one review states, "a mosaic of thrilling untold stories from the theatre of war".

I would like to add that it also shows the extent of the humiliation of a people possessed of a once great civilisation.