A Stranger in Your Own City

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi journalist, traces the arc of his country's destruction across two decades of war, occupation, and civil conflict. Part memoir and part reported narrative, the book moves from Abdul-Ahad's childhood under Saddam Hussein through the American invasion, the sectarian civil wars, the rise and fall of the Islamic State (IS), and the popular uprisings that followed.

The book opens in 2007, with Abdul-Ahad in a Baghdad hotel room listening to mortars and convoys. He sorted old school friends onto the city's new sectarian map, only to find most had scattered abroad. Working as a translator, he cringed at the question that defined every Iraqi in Western eyes: "Are you a Sunni or a Shia?" He challenges the narrative that Iraq was a "fake construct," arguing that the country developed a genuine common identity over a century of centralized government and that sectarian framing imposed by outsiders preceded the fragmentation.

Abdul-Ahad's childhood unfolded during the Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988. His father identified fighter jets from the rooftop while the family sheltered under a table. The regime framed the conflict as a continuation of seventh-century Arab conquests, and Saddam Hussein, bearing the title "Leader Necessity," dominated every institution: His portrait hung in classrooms, an hour of nightly television praised him, and using his name irreverently carried severe punishment.

After Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the American-led bombing campaign destroyed infrastructure in 40 days of war. Thirteen years of UN sanctions hollowed out the state: Teachers earned two dollars a month, pilots drove taxis, and infant mortality doubled. Saddam pivoted to Islam and tribalism, launching the Faith Campaign and refining his patronage system. The prominent Shia cleric Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr gained a following among the poor, but the regime assassinated him and two of his sons in 1999. His youngest son, Muqtada al-Sadr, later led a rebellion against the Americans.

Before the 2003 invasion, Abdul-Ahad lived as an impoverished architect and military deserter in a tiny room he called the Red Room. When war came on March 20, he kept a journal, cycled through bombed streets, and was briefly arrested before bribing his way free. On April 9, he watched American armored vehicles arrive. At Firdos Square, a Marine draped an American flag over Saddam's statue before pulling it down; the statue proved hollow. Looting erupted, gutting ministries, the National Library, and the Iraqi Museum. Abdul-Ahad was hired as a translator by British journalist James Meek, abandoned architecture, bought a camera, and by 2004 worked as a freelance journalist for a wire agency.

The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), led by Paul Bremer, made two decisions widely blamed for igniting the insurgency: disbanding the Iraqi army and banning Baath Party members from public employment. The CPA established a Governing Council selected by sectarian and ethnic quotas, inaugurating the Muhassasa system, the allocation of state resources along communal lines that enabled corrupt religious warlords to dominate for decades. Returning Shia exiles promoted madhloumiya, a narrative of historical Shia oppression: Because Saddam was Sunni, all Sunnis were cast as oppressors. Sunni Arabs, pressured to produce a collective identity they had never possessed, defined themselves primarily by opposition to the new order.

Violence escalated rapidly. In Fallujah, American soldiers killed 13 unarmed demonstrators weeks after the invasion, and the town became an epicenter of rebellion. Abdul-Ahad embeds with jihadi fighters from al-Tawhid and al-Jihad, the precursor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, on the eve of the Second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004. The foreign volunteers spoke of martyrdom with anticipation, while the unit's Iraqi commander fought for nationalist reasons but adopted religious rhetoric to attract funding. Hameed, a former officer in Saddam's security apparatus, embodies the Sunni rebellion's complexity: He organized resistance from cousins and neighbors but opposed al-Qaeda's killing of Shia civilians. By 2007, squeezed between al-Qaeda and Shia militias, Hameed disappeared and his body was never found.

After al-Qaeda bombed the Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra in February 2006, the sectarian civil war consumed Baghdad. Militiamen from Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army and Ministry of Interior paramilitaries fanned across the city, kidnapping and killing hundreds of Sunni men. Neighborhoods self-segregated behind barricades. The Baghdad morgue received 40 bodies on quiet days. Millions fled, and Abdul-Ahad's own extended family scattered across the globe within three years of the invasion.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki consolidated power, appointing loyal generals without parliamentary approval and creating intelligence services staffed by members of his clan. Abdul-Ahad's old high school friend Hassan, now an army surgeon, initially defended Maliki as "the best of the worst" before reversing himself, describing ghost soldiers on payrolls and officers paying bribes for their posts. Hundreds of billions of oil dollars were squandered.

The Syrian civil war, beginning in 2011, catalyzed the next phase as jihadis revived old networks from the Iraq war. Abu Baker al-Baghdadi, the future IS caliph, declared the merger of Jabhat al-Nusra into IS in April 2013, sparking a jihadi civil war. In Iraq, Sunni protest camps erupted after Maliki moved against Sunni politicians, but tribal sheikhs co-opted the movement. When government troops dismantled the camps in late 2013, armed fighters seized Fallujah.

In June 2014, Mosul fell to IS in days as soldiers deserted en masse. At Camp Speicher near Tikrit, IS militants executed approximately 1,700 young military cadets. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa, or religious edict, urging men to volunteer, and Shia militias coalesced into the Hashed al-Sha'abi (Popular Mobilization Forces), backed by Iranian advisers. On the Diala front lines, militia fighters articulated an explicitly sectarian vision. Hadi al-Amiri, head of the Badr corps, told Abdul-Ahad that creating a "Shia belt around Baghdad" required demographic cleansing. A Shia politician warned: "We are in the process of creating Shia al-Qaeda." In Mosul, IS constructed a totalitarian city-state, replacing government structures with ministry-like diwans, expelling Christians and other minorities, and imposing religious codes enforced by Hisba morality police.

The battle to recapture Mosul began in October 2016 and lasted 10 months. Abdul-Ahad embeds with a special forces colonel whose unit fought block by block. When a general authorized an air strike on a building where civilians reportedly sheltered, overriding Lieutenant Ali's objection, Ali asked Abdul-Ahad afterward whether God would punish him. In the aftermath, accused IS members were tortured and executed without trial. The officers feared peace more than combat, predicting the next war would be against the Shia militias.

On March 21, 2019, nearly 300 people boarded a ferry to a pleasure island on the Tigris during the Nowruz new year holiday; the ferry's capacity was 80. Abdul-Ahad reconstructs the disaster through three people whose fates converge: Shahla, a divorced woman; Ustad Ahmad, a schoolmaster; and Aya, a 19-year-old literature student. The ferry capsized just over a minute into the crossing; 128 were confirmed dead and 69 remained missing. The island's owner had profited under IS by trading confiscated Christian properties and was reportedly protected by the Shia militia Asaib Ahl al-Haq in exchange for a share of the business.

In October 2019, hundreds of thousands of young, predominantly Shia protesters surged into Baghdad's Tahrir Square in what became known as the Tishreen Uprising, a leaderless revolt against the entire ruling class. Security forces killed over 100 protesters in the first six days. Tuk-tuk rickshaws became the uprising's symbol, ferrying the injured like ambulances. Abdul-Ahad reflects that the moment "restored our dignity, and wiped out the shame of the civil war." The protests failed to dislodge the ruling class, but Abdul-Ahad argues that Tishreen demonstrated the post-2003 state can no longer satisfy its people, and that the ruling parties' failure to heed its warnings will lead to their eventual demise.