Q&A: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad Has Seen Enough of American Wars in the Middle East

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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad was a young graduate from architecture school when the American invasion of Iraq began in 2003. Watching American soldiers march down the street in front of his apartment, Abdul-Ahad quickly dropped what he was doing—“ugly work for ugly people who had the money to afford their ugly houses”—and followed them to Firdos Square, where he watched, in horror, as they draped a statue of Saddam Hussein with an American flag, and pulled it down. “This moment when they put the American flag on, the whole idea of ‘liberation’ collapses,” he says.

Still, Abdul-Ahad was intrigued. Within days, he’d signed on with a British reporter from The Guardian, working as a translator, before later striking out as a reporter of his own. His 2023 book, A Stranger in Your Own City, includes both previously reported stories and a large swath of new memories from his journeys across the Middle East in the years that followed.

In this conversation, recorded live at the Zeg Storytelling Festival, in Tbilisi, Georgia, and edited for length and clarity, Abdul-Ahad speaks with The Kicker about his career and his approach to the craft—and what he thinks American policymakers still don’t understand about the legacy they left in Iraq.

You can listen to this and other conversations from The Kicker’s collaboration with ZegFest here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

JH: One of your most recent articles for The Guardian was about a young man you called Mustafa, who you described as a “reluctant collaborator” with the Syrian regime. But you resisted the temptation to moralize and categorize him. Could you talk a little bit about his story and what drew you to Mustafa?

GAA: When I started journalism in Iraq, I was a military deserter. So I started looking at things with this high morality: “Look, I never compromised. I never joined the regime. None of my family joined the regime. So all of you who have compromised are beneath me.” And that was my attitude for the first six months in 2003. And little by little, I was smacked in the head and realized how difficult life is. So in the past twenty years, you realize all of us have to make these little choices. And at the end of the day, we’re all trying to save ourselves, save our families. And what choices do we make to reach that point? 

Mustafa was one of those people. Mustafa had to survive a regime, a brutal regime. Mustafa comes from—if we put this kind of sectarian ethnic map, he would be labeled as within the opposition masses of Damascus, living in a small neighborhood. These neighborhoods were the hotbed of the rebels in the outskirts of Damascus. And his father is a religious man; his sister wears the burka. So he is a suspect in the eyes of the regime. Now, how do you come out of this? Because also when we look at the war, we think of it as a regime versus rebels. But in reality, the neighborhoods split. You have the old gangs working for the government, then other gangs working for rebels. And within all that kind of landscape, here is a certain person who was beaten up so harshly when he was sixteen, seventeen, that he decides, You know what? My rule number one: I will never be beaten up ever again.

And he wasn’t an ideologue. 

Absolutely. Sitting in this room…we can easily say, Oh, he compromised, he joined the regime militia. But from his perspective it was, How do I save myself? And of course he doesn’t. 

Late in the piece, you’re describing the scene in Damascus in the aftermath of the fall of Assad. And you almost, I think, instinctually compare it to the aftermath of Baghdad and the fall of Saddam. What was that experience like for you? Are you able to see hope and joy, or does your brain just flash back through the last however many years and think, Oh, I know where these things end up?

The biggest challenge for me, as an Iraqi when it comes to Syria, is to stop being an Iraqi. Because I lived through the moments when the regime in Baghdad fell. I also saw the aftermath of the Taliban falling in Afghanistan, but the Iraq experience shaped my life. You know, I was a civilian, then I became a journalist when the statue fell. And a lot of what happened also became my daily life as a journalist. So when you go to Syria, you see the resemblance, you see a Baathist regime, a dictator falling, the army melting away, the uniforms in the streets, the tanks abandoned in the street, all scenes from Baghdad 2003. And yet it is so very different. It is different because there is no foreign army, apart from a little bit of Uighurs and Uzbeks. And you don’t find any foreign occupation. 

Also the moment of 2003 in Iraq was the moment when we Iraqis realized, Oh God, we are Sunnis and Shia and Kurds, and we started fragmenting along these lines. In Syria, it is the aftermath of a civil war, so it’s been going on for fourteen years. You have the sense that people are tired from war, while in Iraq it was beginning. 

Can we go back to the beginning, to your book, and how you ended up as a journalist? At the time of the invasion, you’re an architect, but you’re also clearly interested in people, interested in the city, observant—but not imagining being a journalist. How did that happen?

You don’t know what journalism is because growing up in Iraq under the Saddam regime, journalism is this newspaper you read in the morning that starts with the speeches of the leader and ends with the wisdom of the leader. So journalism was a government job, like the intelligence service, like anything—a despised job in Iraq. 

But the fact that the biggest army in the universe invades your street, and you come down and you look at these American Marine amphibious vehicles as if the shores of Normandy is down the street, that becomes a fascinating moment. And then you see the statue falling.

And you describe watching it, thinking, Oh no, don’t do it this way. Some part of your brain is registering, Let the people bring this down.

I mean, this moment when they put the American flag on, this whole idea of “liberation” collapses, within five minutes of pulling down the statue. But then I wanted to see Saddam’s palace. This is the person who has dominated my life since I was born. Who is he? How did he lead us? Why did he do these things? I thought if I walked into the palace, I would just find the answers. Of course I didn’t, but then I met James Meek from The Guardian, and the rest is history, and I became a journalist. 

In your book, one thing that seems to mystify you as you start to work as a reporter is the importing of an intense sectarianism that wasn’t there before.

To start work as a translator, you adapt and adopt a way of thinking. So when the journalists you’re working with—God bless the New York Times, I was working with them for a while—when they start asking me, “Find me a Sunni” or “Find me a Shia, because we want to do this kind of story or that kind of thing,” you start categorizing people as Sunnis and Shia. I started putting numbers on my old Nokia phone: so-and-so is a Sunni, or so-and-so is a Shia. And it took me more than five years to start trying to unlearn this.

I don’t want to say that we didn’t have sects in Iraq. Of course we had sects. Of course there were Sunnis and Shias and the Christians—and the Christians, mashallah, they had their own twelve sects in Iraq—but it was a cultural thing. It was always something that you celebrate; you go to this mosque in this time of the year, the church in this other time of year. It was a cultural phenomenon. But the invasion itself weaponized these differences. When you divide the society into oppressed and the oppressor, you push a whole segment of the Iraqi—because Saddam was a Sunni, then all Sunnis are, by association, guilty of oppressing the Iraqis. This is a recipe for civil war.

Do you think that Americans today understand what they did to Iraq?

The first time I went to New York was, I think, around 2005. I’m staying in a very nice apartment, lovely city, and I switched on the TV, and I thought, you know, two years into the Iraq War, I thought people would burn American tanks in the streets—I thought the coverage would be twenty-four hours about the Iraq War. Nothing. The only item about Iraq was how a band was visiting Iraq or something. 

So it kind of shocked me. And up until today, I still don’t know why. If I was an American conservative neocon, why would America invade Iraq? To lose so much money on that country and then turn that country into the biggest ally of their opponent in the region, which is Iran. So even politically, from an American conservative point of view, it was a very dumb project, let alone the disaster it unleashed in the region. 

Now, I’m not saying Saddam—Saddam was evil. But also I find this binary choice—every taxi in the Middle East, it’s, “Ah, you’re Iraqi. So which was better, Saddam or the Americans?” As if we Iraqis don’t have a choice, you know? It’s only a mad dictator or an illegal occupation, and that is the problem. So my anger with Americans is not only destroying Iraq, not only committing massacres. It’s that not a single person went to jail for the things they did in Iraq. Not George Bush, not Nouri al-Maliki. No one has ever stood and said, “I’m sorry for the things we’ve done.”

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