Nir Rosen’s voice is quiet, almost gentle, and at first it’s a little difficult to hear him when I call him at his hotel in Manhattan. He’s been back in the States for about a week, just returned from his latest foray into the killing fields of Iraq — a place he’s set to revisit to in about a month’s time.

As a freelance journalist, Rosen has been shuttling back and forth to Iraq since April 2003, when as a 27-year-old with few journalistic credits to his name he convinced Time magazine to send him there as a stringer. Since then he’s written for a bevy of big publications: the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Salon, Mother Jones, Boston Review and the Asia Times, and in early May published his first book, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. Not bad for a guy who says that “I wasn’t really a journalist until I got to Iraq. I’d written about five articles probably over a couple of years.” Before that, he had worked as a nightclub bouncer and “an investigator for the Najavo Indians, for their law firm.”

These days, Rosen, who was born in New York City, lives with his wife in Istanbul, Turkey, although he says his residency there is tenuous since “I’m never there,” as the last three years have seen him reporting extensively from Iraq and Pakistan, with plans to go to Afghanistan.

His book comes amid a fusillade of other works by journalists trying to give voice to the chaos of their time in Iraq, but Rosen — who speaks Iraqi Arabic and who was the only Western journalist to get inside the network of insurgents in Fallujah just before the massive American assault there in the spring of 2004 — paints a more nuanced, intimate portrait than many others are able to. Like the Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid (who is American, but of Lebanese descent), Rosen is both able to talk to Iraqis and blend in with them, since his father is Iranian, so “I have dark skin, so I look like everybody else.”

This ability, and his willingness to work alone, is what has distinguished Rosen’s work from the beginning. While in Iraq, he makes it a point to stay away from other Western journalists, and his book shows the fruits of this determination.

I asked him about the perspective he is able to bring to the emotions and politics behind the insurgency, especially the amount of time that he spent listening to sermons in mosques, which gives an important fly-on-the-wall view to his account of the formation of the unrest in mid- 2003 and early 2004. In effect, it’s just like anywhere else, as “in Iraq, it’s all about having the right friends,” he explains. “People from various tribes who are in some way friends or neighbors or relatives of people who you want to meet that are hard to get to. I just got lucky and managed to make the right friends. I found people are generally pretty receptive once they feel comfortable that I was a journalist and not a spy.”

But as we’ve noted before, things are different now, and the days when reporters could get around on their own, in 2003 and early 2004, are long since over. “By the spring of 2004 people were more and more tense, and afraid of strangers coming in to their neighborhoods. By that time, the sectarian trajectory was pretty apparent, and now I believe it’s a full scale civil war.” Rosen says that now he can’t move with the same freedom he had in 2003, but that in retrospect, back in the early days, “I did a lot of stupid things that could have ended up much worse than it did — it was mostly just luck that it didn’t.” He says that none of his Iraqi friends are willing to go and do the kinds of stories they used to, because it’s just to dangerous to go into many Baghdad neighborhoods.

While the opportunities for Western reporters to go out in the streets is limited, Rosen knows that even posing as an Iraqi only provides him with so much protection. Life is cheap in Iraq, and being a journalist provides you with no special security. Just this past February, Atwar Bahjat, a popular Iraqi TV host for the Al-Arabiya network, was killed near Samarra along with cameraman Khaled Mahmoud al-Falahi and engineer Adnan Khairallah.

Rosen is obviously well aware of the danger, and of the battle in the United States over the “hotel journalism” canard, which holds that American reporters never leave their hotel compounds. “I’m critical of the American media in general for many things,” he says, “but not for their failure to get around. At this point getting around is suicidal. The fact that I often do it is only because my wife doesn’t know how dangerous it is. [Other reporters] just can’t, especially if you don’t look local. It’s impossible. People will kidnap you and not necessarily for political reasons, but for financial reasons. And your [Iraqi] staff probably won’t be able to take you anywhere either, because they have those same fears.”

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