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In the Belly of the Green Bird
Nir Rosen
The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq
Free Press
May 2006
288 pages ISBN: 0743277031 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political | Non-Fiction
Nir Rosen has been hailed by The New York Review of
Books as the reporter who managed to get inside Fallujah
"at a time when it was a death trap for Western reporters,"
and as one of the few Western reporters able to report the
truth from Iraq. Still in his twenties, a freelancer who has
written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic
Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, Rosen speaks
Iraqi-accented Arabic and has managed to report from some of
the country's most dangerous locales. Even The Weekly
Standard notes that "he probably has more sources in the
insurgency than any other American reporter."
Rosen knows better than anyone how much the Americans are
hated, and how deeply the Sunni Iraqis hate the Shias and
vice versa. He has listened to the insurgents, and he knows
that they will never rest until the Americans are gone. Too
many Sunnis and Shias are willing to use violence for Iraq
to ever have peace. The overthrow of Saddam has proved to be
nothing less than a triumph for the martyrs who use violence
at every turn.
Ever since the fall of Saddam's regime Rosen has been in
and out of Iraq, from north to south, listening to Friday
sermons in mosques, breaking bread with dangerous men,
interviewing political henchmen, joining Shia pilgrims, and
listening to ordinary Iraqis who face American soldiers on
raids in the Sunni triangle. He has had to plead for his
life at times, and he has received more than one death
threat. He has been pres-ent when bombs were detonated, and
he has sat in meetings of insurgent leaders as they made
policy decisions about territory they controlled. He has
heard the double messages of Iraqi leaders -- the careful
English messages for Western ears and the unvarnished
hostility in Arabic -- and he has interviewed politicians
and imams and seen how the insurgents and gang leaders
create militias, private courts, prisons, security services,
and more.
In the Belly of the Green Bird is a searing
report, unlike any other book about the American experience
in Iraq. Almost everything covered in the Western media has
been at least one or two steps removed from the minds and
acts of the people who will determine the future of Iraq.
Some of them are peaceful, some are violent. Some of them
hate one another with the intensity of ancient enemies. The
depth of discord between Sunnis and Shias is difficult to
fathom without listening to them. Their anti-Americanism is
much more recent, but not much less intense. The divisions
within this cobbled-together country, much like those within
Yugoslavia after Tito, are simply too intense to contain.
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