Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq - Hardcover

Goldfarb, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786715154 ISBN 13: 9780786715152

Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 2005

Synopsis

From public radio journalist Michael Goldfarb comes the most stirring narrative to emerge from the Second Gulf War, from the frontlines of battle, to the home of an Iraqi Kurdish family, and into the hearts of two men from different cultures whose friendship and passion for freedom will inspire all. Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace is Goldfarb’s moving tribute to Ahmad Shawkat, the Iraqi Kurd who served as his translator during “Major Combat Operations,” whose life’s work was to promote freedom, and who was ultimately murdered during the American occupation. Goldfarb recounts his powerful relationship with Ahmad and introduces readers to the life of a true Iraqi hero.

Eighteen years old when the Ba’ath Party seized control of Iraq, Ahmad was imprisoned and tortured twice by Saddam Hussein’s regime, was forced to fight in the Iraqi army against Iran, and was banished from his hometown of Mosul for his anti-Saddam political writings. Just as he began to taste freedom with the fall of Saddam and his large family’s return to Mosul, Ahmad was murdered for publicly decrying Islamic terror. As Goldfarb investigates his friend's murder, he mourns this loss and contemplates what dangers await the Iraqi people in their uncertain future.

About this title

About the Author

For almost two decades, Michael Goldfarb has been public radio's most familiar voice from London. He is currently senior correspondent for Inside Out,” the award-winning radio documentary unit of WBUR Boston. He has covered major conflicts from Bosnia to Iraq to Northern Ireland. In 2003, he was awarded broadcast journalism's highest honor, the DuPont-Columbia Award for his report Surviving Torture.” In 2005 he won the Lowell Thomas award given by the Overseas Press Club for his report, British Jihad: Inside Out.” Since September 2001, Goldfarb has reported extensively from the Middle East. His Inside Out” documentaries are heard on more than 150 public radio stations around the country.

From Publishers Weekly

Ahmad Shawkat, an educated Iraqi Kurd, was imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime for his dissident writings, fought in the Iran-Iraq war and endured the misery of life under the U.N. sanctions. Public radio correspondent Goldfarb hired him as a translator when he was covering the 2003 invasion and found him to be almost a poster person for the Bush administration's vision of a reconstructed Iraq—a secular, cultured, tolerant intellectual with a fierce commitment to democratic principles. Shawkat seemed poised to flourish after Saddam's fall when he received a grant from the occupation authorities to start a political newspaper and a "democracy training institute." But, Goldfarb says, the return of a corrupt ex-Baathist establishment under American patronage and the rise of Islamic militancy dashed Shawkat's hopes for a liberal democracy, and his editorials against these two tendencies finally got him assassinated. Goldfarb draws a delicate portrait of his friend and of the growing chaos and disillusionment of Iraqi society, where Shawkat's idealistic but rudderless writings—he named his newspaper Without Direction—were pushed aside by hardening attitudes. Shawkat emerges as a tragic figure, a voice of individual conscience in a country still ruled by rigid ideology and tribal loyalties. Photos.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0786715154
• ISBN 13: 9780786715152
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336