Iraq / War / Journalism
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Five bloody years in Baghdad
/ SYNOPSIS
Imagine cheering on your national football team as your country falls apart; risking suicide bombers and kidnappers to go to the shops; or driving your wife to hospital through roadblocks manned by terrorists as she’s about to give birth… Red Zone: Five Bloody Years in Baghdad is
Oliver Poole’s extraordinary account of daily life for Iraqis, as well as the British and American soldiers sent to Iraq. It’s also the story of Ahmed Ali, tourist guide turned Telegraph interpreter, a job that made him an insurgent target.
Poole first crossed into Iraq in March 2003, from Kuwait, as a Daily Telegraph reporter, ‘embedded’ in the back of an American armoured vehicle. Three weeks later, his unit had fought their way to Baghdad. But when Poole returned to London, he was haunted by the dead: had the bloodshed been worthwhile?
Eighteen months later, as the Telegraph’s Baghdad Bureau Chief, he came back to find a country racked by suicide bombs and the burgeoning horror of the Sunni-Shia civil war. There he met Ahmed, his closest friend in Baghdad. For the next two years, they worked out of the Baghdad hotel suite where Poole lived. Inevitably, they could not remain unscathed: Poole’s hotel-home was blown up and finally Ahmed’s family, part Shia, part Sunni, tainted by their international connections, became engulfed by the violence.
Poole first crossed into Iraq in March 2003, from Kuwait, as a Daily Telegraph reporter, ‘embedded’ in the back of an American armoured vehicle. Three weeks later, his unit had fought their way to Baghdad. But when Poole returned to London, he was haunted by the dead: had the bloodshed been worthwhile?
Eighteen months later, as the Telegraph’s Baghdad Bureau Chief, he came back to find a country racked by suicide bombs and the burgeoning horror of the Sunni-Shia civil war. There he met Ahmed, his closest friend in Baghdad. For the next two years, they worked out of the Baghdad hotel suite where Poole lived. Inevitably, they could not remain unscathed: Poole’s hotel-home was blown up and finally Ahmed’s family, part Shia, part Sunni, tainted by their international connections, became engulfed by the violence.
/ CHARITY
Part of the proceeds of Red Zone will go to International PEN, the world writers’
organization, who helped Ahmed Ali and his family flee Iraq for America.
/ PRESS REVIEWS
| Listen to Oliver Poole discussing reporting from Iraq at the Reuters Institute in Oxford, October 2008. |
• The Economist: Blood in Basra and beyond
• The Guardian: "First Person" on Oliver Poole
• BBC NEWS: Ordinary life in a broken country
• The Independent: Oliver Poole: What the war taught me
• Yorkshire Post: Iraq... five years on
• Cherwell.org: Interview: Oliver Poole
‘A brilliant, first-hand account
of the madness and horror of post
invasion Iraq. Illuminating and moving.’
Patrick Bishop, author of Fighter Boys
Praise for best-selling Black Knights: On the Bloody Road to Baghdad by Oliver Poole (Harper Collins £6.99)
“The best reporter’s book of the war so far…the eye-witness accounts of the fighting, the terrible guilt of the soldiers at the killing of civilians, the confusion, the continuous question of why they are there, are exhilarating and chilling.” Robert Fox, Evening Standard.
| Baghdad Street Scene Through The Window Of A US Humvee Video by Oliver Poole |
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Catalogue Details
March 2008
Hardback Exclusive to Reportage Press
Price: £.18.99
ISBN 978-0-9555729-7-5
216 x 138mm 384pp 16 plates and maps
Large Paperback Price: £12.99
ISBN 978-0-9558302-5-9 216x138 mm 384pp plus 16 colour plates and maps Foreign Rights: World
Reportage Press is a new publishing house specialising in books on foreign affairs or set in foreign countries; non-fiction, fiction, essays, travel books, old travel memoirs, or just books written from a stranger’s view.
Daniela Norris and Shireen Anabtawi in discussion - October 12th, London Jewish Cultural Centre
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