Michael Totten in Kirkuk

[Aristophanes]

Read this if you want an account of the war which is unbiased and is so good as to actually provide us HUMAN interest reporting in Iraq that doesn't portray Middle Eastern people as savages, lunatics, or, even, as 'freedom fighters', but as people.

KIRKUK, IRAQ – Just south of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq’s northernmost provinces lies the violence-stricken city of Kirkuk, the bleeding edge of Iraq’s “greater” Kurdistan, and the upper-most limit of the asymmetric battleground known as the Red Zone. Kirkuk is claimed and counterclaimed by Iraq’s warring factions and is a lightning rod for foreign powers – namely Turkey -- that fear a violent ethnic unraveling of their own that could be triggered by any change in Kirkuk’s convulsive status quo.

I spent a day there with Member of Parliament and Peshmerga General “Mam” Rostam, Kirkuk’s Chief of Police Major Sherzad, my colleague Patrick Lasswell, and our driver Hamid Shkak. You could stay a month in Kirkuk hunkered down in a compound or a house and not see or hear signs of war. But violence erupts somewhere in Kirkuk several times every day. If you go there with a Kurdish army general, as we did, and spend your day with the city’s chief of police, as we also did, you will see violence or at least the aftermath of some violence. This isn’t a maybe. So I brought my video camera as well as my Nikon along.

From the safety of the Kurdish city of Suleimaniya – where the war is already over – Kirkuk looks like the mouth of Hell. It’s outside the safe fortress of the Kurdistan mountains and down in the hot and violent plains. The city doesn’t look much better up close, and you can feel the tension rise with the temperature in the car on the way down there.

There's a lot to read, and you can find the rest here...

The main reason I decided to post this is because Iraqi people are never treated in this forum as ACTUAL people, they're always pawns to be manipulated depending on your ideological bent. It's simplistic: these people are so much more complex than that, and their stories have as much validity as those of the people who were murdered in Virginia.

I admit this isn't a poem about Iraq by a guy sitting in comfort in England, but you can't have everything, can you?

Another good source for actual reporting in Iraq is Michael Yon, although he tends to spend most of his time with coalition soldiers, rather than with Iraqis.
You can find his writing here...