Iraqi Blogs: “A great civilization of more than 7000 years is going to waste.”

Mother Jones has an interview with Iraqi Bloggers.
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Photo here.

Treasure of Baghdad, an Iraqi journalist working for an American newspaper, describes grieving for his friend’s mother, killed in a mortar attack. Sunshine, a 14-year old girl living in Mosul, relates the deaths of friends’ families at the hands of insurgents and the shooting of her own uncle by American soldiers. These accounts, in their attention to personal, even mundane details, offer a perspective largely absent from mainstream media reports. Treasure reports that his friends have stopped carrying identification with them anywhere, lest their names serve as a pretext for murder. Sunshine describes being prevented from reaching her biology final by a mine planted in the road. Iraqi Roulette, a third blogger, describes how at one point she swore off political conversation entirely and sought solace The Art of Happiness, by the Dalai Lama.

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"All I want is to derive some relief from what I write and to let others in the world know that Iraqis are not criminals: we are educated and modern and we adore life. I want them to know that Baghdad was one of the world’s most beautiful and cosmopolitan cities. It was destroyed because of the successive wars that America was involved in, directly or indirectly."
-Treasure of Baghdad

"At least Saddam was one obvious lunatic; now it is too hard to recognize and count them all.
I think most Americans know by now the real state of things in Iraq.But if I had to explain it to them, I think I would say: Imagine that hurricane Katrina is to go on for ever and ever and ever, and yet you are expected to live and function in that exact state of destruction, death, looting, abduction, loss of your loved ones and lack of medical and general services. That is the closest parallel I can draw to help them understand the situation we are living or dying in."
-Iraqi Roulette

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Updated Iraqi Blogs here:
And don't forget Pictures In Baghdad
and Baghdad Burning.