Wendell Steavenson - openDemocracy

Afterwards

Yesterday Omer sent me, in an email attachment, some of the pictures he took with the digital camera I gave him. They were from the road between Kirkuk and Baghdad;

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 11 Jun 2003

Before the fall

Sulaimaniya, Kurdistan, Monday April 7, day 19 of the war A strange sight, while the Iraqi regime dissipates into rubble on the other side of our front line: a press

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 7 Apr 2003

A light in the north

Sulaimaniya, Kurdistan, Saturday 29 March, day 10 of the war The Shabab tea-house is a cavernous room filled with men smoking, drinking tulip glasses of tea. The smack of dominoes

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 31 Mar 2003

I am blind with crying: in the Kurdistan mountains

Sulaimaniya, Kurdistan, Thursday 27 March, day 8 of the war Thursday morning brought laughter in the midst of war, with the news that the Americans had parachuted into northern Iraq

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 28 Mar 2003

On the Kurdistan frontline: longing for war and Kirkuk

War is coming, just down the road. Everyone in Kurdistan is afraid and hopeful of it. Mam Rostum is an old-guard peshmerga who has been fighting since 1967. He is

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 19 Mar 2003

With the Iraqi opposition: if, how, and then what?

At the end of February, 55 delegates came together for the Iraqi Opposition Conference in northern Iraq. Among them were Shia, Sunni, Arab, Kurd, Assyrian, and Chaldean delegates; exiled

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 3 Mar 2003

A big mess in Kurdistan

Mam Rostum has a heavily-set weather-tanned face, a thick squat body wrapped in the folds of a khaki peshmerga semi-uniform of baggy pantaloons, a wide sash round his stomach and

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 27 Feb 2003

Waiting

Tehran is like a waiting room at the moment. Iraqi opposition diplomats are everywhere shuffling behind closed doors. Nobody knows what will happen and everything is only hypothesis. In six

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 6 Feb 2003

Torture stories

There are 300,000 Iraqis in exile in Iran; mostly Shia from the south. Either deported in the early 1980s as potential traitors during the IranIraq war or escaped

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 22 Jan 2003

Drinking Tehran dry

Driving on the highway to the south of Tehran downhill at 150 km an hour. Two hours ago this road was static jam; now it is free-flowing dodgems threaded with

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 20 Jan 2003

Ordinary people cant be bothered (life is hard enough as it is)

It doesnt much matter to me if Aghajari is executed or not, said Farhad Shirazi (not his real name), sitting in his Tehran apartment with his family, offering me

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 19 Dec 2002

Between fear and hope in Kurdistan

I knew I was going to like Kurdistan after I went to see the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) guy in Tehran about getting into Kurdistan. In the middle of

By Wendell Steavenson

/ 4 Dec 2002