I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.

In March last year, I had made an entry (Just around the riverbend) about Baghdad Burning, a blog by an anonymous Iraqi woman who goes by the name Riverbend. She has been posting entries in this blog since August 17th 2003 – her entries being true tales of a life governed by fear, hate, misery and distrust. The italicized text above was her very first entry in her blog.

Well, her blog was converted into two books: Baghdad Burning – Girl blog from Iraq and Baghdad Burning II – More Girl blog from Iraq. The first book went up for the $52,000 Samuel Johnson Literary prize, chronicling three years of war and destruction in Iraq, with no filtering whatsoever from the media. The publishers maintained her anonymity at her request.

Riverbend continued blogging, giving a painful and bitter description of the corruption running in politics and how the armed forces now getting involved in raping and killing the very citizens they are supposed to be protecting. The frequency of her blogging reduced greatly over the last year because it took a lot out of her to write about things she hated and could do nothing about. The recent-most raping allegation that happened in February was cleared in less than 14 hours and the accusing woman was thrown in a bad light. That was her entry in February. After a long period of silence, she wrote her last entry in April.

She’s now leaving Iraq. Her home country.

So we’ve been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees- the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare- stay and wait and try to survive.

Riverbend, April 26th 2007

Extract from Google Book Search:
In August 2003, the world gained access to a remarkable new voice: a blog written by a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad, whose identity remained concealed for her own protection. Calling herself Riverbend, she offered searing eyewitness accounts of the everyday realities on the ground, punctuated by astute analysis on the politics behind these events. In a voice in turn eloquent, angry, reflective and darkly comic, Riverbend recounts stories of life in an occupied city-of neighbors whose homes are raided by US troops, whose relatives disappear into prisons and whose children are kidnapped by money-hungry militias. At times, the tragic blends into the absurd, as she tells of her family jumping out of bed to wash clothes and send e-mails in the middle of the night when the electricity is briefly restored, or of their quest to bury an elderly aunt when the mosques are all overbooked for wakes and the cemeteries are all full. The only Iraqi blogger writing from a woman’s perspective, she also describes a once-secular city where women are now afraid to leave their homes without head covering and a male escort. Interspersed with these vivid snapshots from daily life are Riverbend’s analyses of everything from the elusive workings of the Iraqi Governing Council to the torture in Abu Ghraib, from the coverage provided by American media and by Al-Jazeera to Bush’s State of the Union speech. Here again, she focuses especially on the fate of women, whose rights and freedoms have fallen victim to rising fundamentalisms in a chaotic postwar society. With thousands of loyal readers worldwide, the Riverbend blog is widely recognized around the world as a crucial source of information not available through the mainstream media.