Mike Ferner
Voices in The Wilderness

BAGHDAD — Directly across the Tigris River from the offices of Al-Mada newspaper sit some of the most heavily bombed hulks of presidential palaces and government buildings from the U.S. invasion of last year. On this side of the river, concrete blast walls and razor wire extend past the paper’s offices located on Abu Nuwas Street in central Baghdad.

Zuhair Al-Jezairy, assistant managing editor, ignores the scenery as he escorts his guest past a small parking area into a modest courtyard dotted with palm trees. Sitting on the back porch of a gracious, 100 year-old house renovated into newsrooms and offices, he explained the logistics of publishing a morning daily in Iraq.

“We depend on car travel to distribute the paper,” he says, after confirming with his circulation manager that the workday begins at 3:30am for the four drivers. “We take first to the central Baghdad distribution center, and then to other main cities-from Basra in the south to Mossul in the north, all by 10:00.” He acknowledged this schedule routinely results in speeding violations and “last month two accidents.”

by Jo Wilding

We were acting up in Kishmisha, the juice bar at the end of our street, taking bright red lights out of each other’s ears and pockets, making hankies disappear, Peat apparently taking 30 or so ping pong balls out of his mouth and so on, as we seem to do most days. People expect it of us. It would be rude to disappoint them.

A man we didn’t know came in. “Are you some kind of magicians?”

That’s how we met Shakhawan, a journalist from a Kurdish newspaper, Al-Ta’akhi. He and the others live in the offices in Baghdad from Saturday to Wednesday, returning to Erbil and their families in between. The common room walls have pictures of Salah Yousifi, the former editor in chief, killed by Saddam in the 1970s, and another journalist from the paper who disappeared.

Shakawan was arrested, questioned and released under instructions to give information about fellow journalists and students in his university. He fled and the newspaper retreated from Baghdad.