Description
Ahmad Shawkat was an Iraqi Kurd who edited his own radical magazine—Bilattijah— after the fall of Saddam Hussein and who wrote enthusiastically about Iraq’s future as a state free from tyranny, secular and religious, having been imprisoned and tortured four times by the regime.
When Michael Goldfarb went to Iraq the cover the Second Gulf War for the US’s National Public Radio in 2003, Shawkat became his translator, guide and close friend. They planned to stay in touch after Saddam was toppled and Goldfarb returned home.
Their plans did not work out. Shortly after the USA declared victory, Shawkat was shot to death outside his office in Mosul by members of one of the Islamic terror groups he had railed about. His killers have never been caught but Goldfarb swore to memorialise Shawkat’s life in a book, first published in 2005, now republished under a new title. It is a tragic story of an Iraqi idealist and potential role model.
Michael Goldfarb
Michael Goldfarb is an award-winning author, documentarian and podcaster. A native New Yorker, he moved to London in 1985 and spent many years covering conflicts and attempts at conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Iraq for NPR (National Public Radio) in the USA. Since 1993, the BBC has sent him back to America periodically to report on social and cultural changes in his homeland subsequent to his relocation. More recently he has been charting the rise, fall and persistence of Donald Trump in a series of radio documentaries for the BBC; on his FRDH (First Rough Draft of History) podcast (goldfarbpod.com); and at his substack, History of a Calamity (michaelgoldfarb.substack. com). His journalism has won the highest honours on both sides of the Atlantic including the DuPont-Columbia Award, the Overseas Press Club’s Lowell Thomas Award in America and the Sony Gold award in Britain. He has also been a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.” His life as a reporter has led to his writing books. The book on which the present volume is based―Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq―followed his experiences as an unembedded reporter in Kurdistan during the first phase of Gulf War II, between March and April 2003. It was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2005.
Metadata
Publisher: EnvelopeBooks
Extent: 388 pages
Size: 203mm x 127mm (8.0” x 5.0”)
ISBN: 9781915023070
Contact: editor@envelopebooks.co.uk
Reviews
“Goldfarb does us an immense service with his sensitive, multifaceted portrait of a democratic, secular Iraqi patriot…Among the best of the growing number of accounts of the Iraqi war.”
John Brady
“A sad and necessary book that distills all of the country’s blighted hopes in one man. Shawkat…was one of the good guys.”
Dexter Filkins
“Whether one supports or opposes the war, Goldfarb’s book helps explain, at a person-to-person level, what is transpiring in Iraq and why.”
Bernadette Murphy
“In the end, Goldfarb – a supporter of the US war and caustic critic of Saddam – concludes that the death of his friend is symbolic of the American failure in Iraq, from not preventing the looting after the invasion to the continued inability to provide security to the freed people.”
Greg Mitchell
“Occasionally…there emerge individuals who rise above the surface and remind us all what is right and true, and why humanity will always have hope…Ahmad Shawkat was such a man. A Kurd raised in Mosul, a poet and a humanist, he was a lighthouse of inspiration for those who knew him. Now Ahmad’s story may do the same for all of us through the vivid portrait painted with Michael Goldfarb’s pen. The tragic story of his life, and murder, is on e that no historian or solder, no statesman or humanitarian, can afford to miss…Read this, and you will understand.”
Robert Bateman
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