Sara Daniel was a French reporter who went to Iraq at the start of the war. Each chapter in her book Voyage To A Stricken Land, Four Years on the Ground reporting from Iraq: A Woman’s Inside Story covers a specific time period and topic from the invasion to the insurgency to the Iraqi and American troops. She came away from her experience extremely cynical believing that Iraq was falling into a civil war due to the U.S. mishandling the occupation.
Daniel starts off with a bang when she went to Fallujah in between the two battles for the city in 2004 to interview members of the insurgency. She was able to talk to Omar Hadid the head of the Fallujah Mujahadeen Council who was a lieutenant to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Imam al-Janabi another one of the militant leaders in the city. Janabi claimed that the Americans had invaded Iraq to carry out a crusade against Fallujah because it the most Islamic in the country. Hadid had just beheaded an American named Nick Berg for Zarqawi’s organization. He said that the insurgents kidnapped people to try to end the occupation. He said it was working because the Philippines agreed to withdraw after some of its nationals were taken. Daniels was shaken by her time with Hadid as he offered to show her a beheading and said if she saw enough of them she would get use to them. The author was a secularist and believed the turn towards Islamism was leading to barbarity and fanaticism.
The book’s main theme was that Americans did a bad job occupying Iraq which eventually led to civil war. Daniel got an early taste of that during the 2003 invasion. She went to Kirkuk and Mosul which were in total chaos. There weren’t enough U.S. troops to impose order. People were looting and houses were set on fire. Right after the invasion there was a protest in Mosul against the U.S. presence. The American troops fired into the crowd killing 15. To make matters worse the U.S. withdrew to their base afterwards leaving the city to descend into anarchy as each community armed themselves against the others. Right from the start the U.S. showed it was not ready to occupy Iraq. The small number of troops for such a large country, the dearth of translators and the lack of understanding of Iraqis spelled disaster. Things only got worse in the coming years which Daniel also experienced.
In 2005 the author was in Kahn Bani Saad a small rural town in Diyala province in eastern Iraq. The local U.S. commander went to meet with the mayor. He complained that the Interior Ministry was run by Shiites and the police along with the Badr Brigade were raiding the area and arresting only Sunnis. He begged the U.S. troops to help stabilize the situation and stop a civil war from happening. The U.S. officer dismissed everything the mayor said as rumors and said he was making the situation worse. The Americans went back to their base while the situation continued to deteriorate. Daniel thought this was the beginning of a civil war and the U.S. was doing nothing about it. The author came away believing that the Americans were indifferent to what Iraqis were experiencing.
Not all the chapters in Voyage To A Stricken Land are of the same quality. In the second half there are several that are not as interesting as the previous ones. Still there is far more good than bad in the book which makes it a worthwhile read. Daniel was able to get around to all different parts of Iraq during the early years of the occupation to report on a variety of stories. She was able to capture the feelings of both Iraqis and the Americans during this period. Most importantly she discovered early on how bad the U.S. was running Iraq which would lead to the country coming apart in a few years.
Link to all of Musings On Iraq’s book reviews listed by topic
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