BLOG as a weapon

Rediff ran a story on an amazing blog. A blog of a young Iraqi girl. Baghdad Burning.

In August 2003 she started the blog with: 'A little bit about myself: I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway.'

Some excerpts from her blog

On a typical day when Bush opened his excuse of a mouth and rattled on about the Iraqi occupation

'Abroad’ in his speech seems to indicate a land of inferior people- less deserving of peace, prosperity and even life.

Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure.

Do the Americans continue to believe such speeches? I couldn’t help but wonder.“They’ll believe anything.” E. sighed. “No matter what sort of absurdity they are fed, they’ll believe it. Think up the most outrageous lie… They have people who’ll believe it.”

On the state of affairs in America-occupied Iraq

We’re so free, we often find ourselves prisoners of our homes... We are so free to assemble that people now fear having gatherings because a large number of friends or family members may attract too much attention and provoke a raid by American or Iraqi forces.

Water has been a big problem in many areas all over Baghdad. Houses without electric water pumps don’t always have access to water.

The electrical situation differs from area to area. On some days, the electricity schedule is two hours of electricity, and then four hours of no electricity. On other days, it’s four hours of electricity to four or six hours of no electricity.

The least pleasant situation is to be caught in mid-day traffic, on a crowded road, in the heat- waiting for the next bomb to go off.

We spent some of yesterday and a good portion of today washing clothes, rinsing them and speculating on how our ancestors fared without washing machines and water pumps.

On Condeleza Rice

She's such a contrast to Bush- he simply looks stupid. She, on the other hand, looks utterly evil.

On the bombing of Baghdad in 2003

What followed was almost a month of heavy bombing. You get to a point during extended air-raids where you lose track of the days. You lose track of time. The week stops being Friday, Saturday, Sunday, etc. The days stop being about hours. You begin to measure time with the number of bombs that fell, the number of minutes the terror lasted and the number of times you wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire and explosions.

On the reality shows aired in Baghdad... Americanisation of the media

Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…I’d not only watch *that* reality show, I’d tape every episode

Her blogposts on the Shias and Sunnis, specifically a misinformed Friedman's article were scathing at the least. Her readership has swelled, after people overcame their doubts, that an Iraqi could write so well and realised that there was more to news than from the conventional media.

Read her first-hand accounts of the war. Even if nothing else, it is MOVING.