For a long time it seemed like the legions of English-speaking Iraqis working for allied forces and private contractors were anonymous in every sense. Their deaths went uncovered, and their lives unexamined. No longer.
"It's nerve-racking when troops roll in to search your neighborhood and want to have lunch -- at your house," writes an anonymous Iraqi, employed by the LA TImes.
Read the LA Times article, a first-person account, along with the New Yorker's incredibly moving* *article on interpreters in Iraq.
UPDATE: Columbia Journalism Review's Paul McLeary was all over this story, back in January '06...
Just days before I met Salih in Iraq this past January, he became a wanted man. A stringer for The Washington Post
in Tikrit, he had helped report a story that ran on January 13, fingering local Tikriti officials who the story said had looted a complex of palaces built by Saddam Hussein.
- The story, like so much else that has gone wrong in Iraq, has its roots in what was supposed to be a sign of progress. Last November, the American military in Tikrit made a big show of handing the palaces over to the
Iraqis. Some time later, after hearing that the palaces had been looted, Salih was one of several Post stringers assigned to cover the story. After seeing the destruction firsthand he sent word back to the Post, which ran a piece that named local Iraqi forces and the head of the local security force, Jassam Jabara, as the culprits. Jabara, who had a history with Salih from an earlier story, was not pleased. As a result, according to Salih’s sources, Jabara placed a $50,000 bounty on his head. Salih fled Tikrit and has yet to return.*
