A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East's Long War

From award-winning journalist and Baghdad-native Ghaith Abdul-Ahad comes a powerful portrait of his city and the Iraqi people told through twenty years of war


The history of reportage has depended on outsiders—Ryzard Kapuscinski witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances Fitzgerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present?

A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s beautiful, shattering answer. This is not a book about Iraq’s history, nor an inventory of the many Middle Eastern wars that have consumed the nation over the past several decades, though both wars and history are part of its narrative, including the 2003 American invasion, the Arab Spring, and the rise of ISIS. This is the tale of a people who once lived under the rule of a megalomaniac leader who shaped the state in his own image; who watched a foreign army invade, topple that leader, demolish the state, and then invent a new country; who experienced the horror of having their home fragmented into a hundred different cities.

When “Shock and Awe” began in March of 2003, Abdul-Ahad was an architect. Within months he would become a translator, then a fixer, then a full-time reporter for The Guardian and elsewhere, chronicling the unbuilding of his centuries-old cosmopolitan city. Beginning at that moment and spanning twenty years, Abdul-Ahad’s book offers a remarkable decentering of the West, and in its place emerges space for everyday people, soldiers, mercenaries, people blown sideways through life by the war. What comes to the fore is the effect on the ground: the human cost, the shifting allegiances, the generational change.

A Stranger in Your Own City is a rare work of beauty and tragedy whose power and relevance lies in its attempt to return the land to the people it belongs to.