WAR BLOGS:
Serve as dispatches from the front
By ANNE-MARIE O'CONNOR
Los Angeles Times
"Baghdad Girl" fills the pink pages of a Web log with photos that show a skinny, dark-eyed teenager hugging her cats, and classroom essays beginning with sentiments such as: "Childhood is a beautiful stage in our life."
The childhood she describes as her own has become a lot more complicated.
"The day before yesterday a big bomb exploded in Baghdad (Iraq) in Al-Rabee Street near my house," the Web log, or blog, reads. "A lot of people died in that explosion, and a lot of cars were burned and so were the shops. The man who did this has killed a lot of people. And I'm so sorry for losing lots of Iraqi people."
Baghdad Girl identifies herself as 13-year-old Raghda Zaid, one of a growing number of Web diarists who are creating Internet sites to post intimate accounts of life in wartime Iraq. Experts say these bloggers put a personal voice on the conflict that reaches beyond newspaper headlines or television footage.
Most of the bloggers use pseudonyms, making skeptics wonder who they are, what their motives might be, and whether they're even blogging from Iraq. But a handful have emerged publicly, and one - Salam Pax, the pseudonym of an architect and translator known as the "Baghdad Blogger" - has become a cult figure. His blog has been published as a book, "Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi," and he has a film deal. But he has not revealed his identity beyond a small circle of journalists and friends.
In its December issue, Foreign Policy journal calls the war in Iraq "blogging's coming-out party," saying Pax and "myriad other online diarists, including U.S. military personnel, (have) emerged to offer real-time analysis and commentary."
"I get the sense that one reason the Iraqis blog is that they don't feel that their lives and reactions to what is going on are understood in the outside world," says Rebecca MacKinnon, a research fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "They know the world's listening."
Because of safety constraints, "it's harder and harder for journalists to get out in the field and interview Iraqis," says MacKinnon, a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo. "The Web can get these voices out easily and cheaply."
MacKinnon invited two Iraqi bloggers to join other Web diarists from around the world at a Harvard conference Dec. 11. The bloggers, Omar Fadhil, 24, and his brother Muhammad, 35, both dentists, are two of three diarists for "Iraq the Model," which has won plaudits for covering U.S. policy developments overlooked or misreported in the U.S. media.
But the blog has also drawn sharp scrutiny for its unabashedly pro-U.S. stance, which places it in contrast to other Iraqi blogs and polls of Iraqi people. Some U.S. bloggers have even tagged the brothers "propagandists" - which they vehemently deny.
"At the beginning, they said, `You are not Iraqis living in Iraq. Now they say we are recruited by the CIA," Omar lamented at a recent gathering at the Hollywood Hills home of U.S. blogger Roger L. Simon. "Maybe we are CIA agents and we don't know," his brother joked.
They have gotten the attention of U.S. policymakers. The brothers were invited to a meeting with President Bush at the White House on Dec. 9. "He said, `Feel comfortable. You have a friend here,'" Muhammad recalled.
The Fadhil brothers say they receive no U.S. government support. They explain that they were shown how to set up the blog on a free Internet site, www.blogger.com, by another Baghdad dentist who is the author of another Web log, "Healing Iraq."
In a recent entry of "Healing Iraq," the author reported that he walked out of his front door one morning and found himself face to face with hooded, armed insurgents, who were setting up a checkpoint and ordering parents and schoolchildren out of the area.
"We watched them from behind the door with my mother frantically trying to get us inside," he wrote. "Tens of voices on the street were chanting (Allah is Great) and the ground beneath us suddenly shook from a nearby explosion. The shooting was frantic now and a series of explosions followed. Everyone in the house rushed to open windows to prevent their shattering from the pressure."
The Fadhil brothers say they are also acquainted with the author of "A Star From Mosul," a 16-year-old blogger in northern Iraq who also writes anonymously. "My name is not Najma Abdullah, and I'm not going to tell you my real name, coz I don't want to get killed," she says on her blog.
Her Dec. 14 entry reported that a neighbor was kidnapped from his bed, a bomb exploded nearby - and she finally relented and allowed her mother to cut her hair. "I didn't care if she messed it up or not," she wrote. "Nobody will see it since we're not getting out of the house."
It is this mingling of historic events with the banal details of daily life that have popularized the Iraq blogs.
In an entry in "Diary From Baghdad," a small-town Iraqi tries to figure out what to do about a lethal unexploded rocket that landed in her garden.
In "Dr. Humanity," a young medical student worries about passing his final exams as he copes with the regular bomb blasts that put health-care workers at the front lines. His hearing is damaged in one explosion; another sends three wounded Iraqi policemen to the hospital where he works; and still another kills several neighbors and rains fingers and flesh on his sister's yard.
"Abroad, if you have a burden, you can talk to a friend or relative or psychiatrist," writes the blogger in "Baghdad Burning." "Here, everyone has their own set of problems - a death in the family, a detainee, a robbery, a kidnapping, an explosion. So you have two choices - take a Valium, or start a blog."
It can be dangerous to invite a foreign journalist into an Iraqi home, but the blogs do invite readers in, with photos of sun-filled, peaceful gardens and living rooms, or allow readers to sit in on a family conversation or crisis.
"Where does the Valium fit in? Imagine, through all of this commotion, an elderly aunt who is terrified of bombing," the "Baghdad Burning" blogger writes. "She stood pacing the hallway, cursing (President) Bush, (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair and anyone involved with the war - and that was during her calmer moments. When she was feeling especially terrified, the curses and rampage would turn into a storm of weeping and desolation (during which she imagines she can't breathe) - we were all going to die. They would have to remove us from the rubble of our home. We'd burn alive," the blogger wrote.
"During those fits of hysteria, my cousin would quietly, but firmly, hand her a Valium and a glass of water."
Unlike "Iraq the Model," many of the blogs are critical of U.S. policy and policymakers' spin. In "A Family in Baghdad, a War Diary," a blogger recalls U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's comment, during widespread looting in Baghdad, that the "untidiness" was "part of the price of getting from a repressed regime to freedom" in which "free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things."
"I don't know how these people think???" sputtered the blog, which is maintained by Faiza Jarrar, a fortysomething engineer and mother of three who resides in western Baghdad. "Do they live like this in America?? People killing, looting and committing all sins, is this really The Freedom?"
"Dr. Humanity," the young medical student who writes the "Iraqi Humanity" blog, expresses a variety of nuanced impressions of the war. He is disturbed by the notorious video of an American soldier shooting to death a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque. He is disturbed at the way the principles of Islam are being used to justify terrorism.
After Iraqi policemen were wounded at another Iraqi car bombing, "I was shocked to see flesh and blood near my feet," he writes. "I asked myself how come that human being (is) doing that to his brother human being. ... I am now praying for peace in Iraq and I wish you (to) pray with me to see a new Iraq, Iraq without Saddam, without terrorists, without explosions."
Some bloggers are hopeful enough about a peaceful future to join the efforts to form a new Iraqi government. In "A Family in Baghdad," Faiza Jarrar writes about trying to persuade her women friends to join a council to prepare for the January elections.
"Today, I had a headache and was very frustrated," she writes. "Not one said yes. Not one." All her friends "had the same answer: `We are afraid.' I told them: `Who shall manufacture the new Iraq?? Who shall form its new Constitution?? Why are you being negative, hiding in your houses?'"
Iraqis who do venture out regularly report a dangerous and uncertain landscape.
In "Iraq the Model," the bloggers report on business commuters growing silent as their minivan nears the "death road" south of Baghdad, the capital. The commuters strip themselves of identification cards and cell phones that could prompt armed insurgents manning checkpoints to target them as pro-U.S. spies.
Another well-read blog, "The Mesopotamian," reports: "We have a family crisis at the moment since we have been struck by a kidnapping for ransom. ... They have even sent a videotape with the usual posture of masked men and the victim (who happens to be my close relative) shown sitting helplessly begging to be saved. ... There is no denying it; Baghdad is terrorized."
The Iraqi bloggers are just one segment of the many voices on Iraq that are crowding onto the Internet with postings such as official U.S. military accounts of the conflict, photos of bleeding and maimed Iraqi civilians, and anonymous first-person accounts from self-described U.S. soldiers.
The Fadhil brothers, of "Iraq the Model," estimate that there are about 100 Iraq blogs (www.iraqblogcount.blogspot.com posts many of the addresses) - a small number compared with China's half a million and Iran's 300,000, according to Harvard's MacKinnon, but a huge increase from the tightly controlled era before U.S. forces ousted Saddam Hussein.
The Fadhils say the proliferation of blogs has been fueled by the spread of Internet cafes throughout Iraq. Cafes typically charge $1 an hour for Web access, a stiff fee for professionals who earn $150 a month. Some bloggers solicit donations.
Experts say Iraqi blogs probably will increase after the development and implementation of software that will make it easier to blog in Arabic. At the moment, the technology is most accessible to the English-speaking and computer-adept.
The blogs get lots of responses - even if some are e-mails asking if anyone wants to work for $500 to $1,000 a day in "personal protection" in Iraq.
In one popular posting on "Baghdad Girl," the blogger reported that her father's car had broken down, forcing him to leave it in a parking lot. When he got back, she wrote, the window was smashed, and the attendant told him that an American patrol had smashed it with a rock.
"Can you believe that? What they did was very bad and hostile. My dad didn't do anything wrong!!!" Baghdad Girl wrote.
Eighteen people wrote back, most of them Americans. Maybe someone else smashed the window and blamed it on the soldiers, one wrote. Maybe the soldiers were worried the car was a decoy for a car bomb, wrote another.
"These soldiers do not know how good your father is," wrote "Sarah," who nicknamed Zaid the "Baghdad Cat Girl." "I am positive, if they knew him, or even knew his cute daughter, they would have protected your father's car."
Until things calm down, Baghdad Girl writes, she has the Internet. "Before two years, when there was peace and security, the life was nice, I was waiting for the summer holiday to play and go out to the public garden with mom and dad and my family and have fun," Baghdad Girl writes.
"Now there is no peace and security, so we rarely go out, now I just sit and work on the computer and work on my blog."
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