IraqiGirl: Diary of a Teenage Girl in Iraq Paperback – Illustrated, August 1, 2009

I was disappointed that I wasted $10.00 on this book. It is a collection of blogs written by an Iraqi teenager over the course of 2 years while she lived in Mosul during some of the worst fighting in Iraq. Calling this a book is really a stretch. Although I am impressed by her grasp of English at such a young age and I think she was much more mature than her contemporaries in the U.S. and elsewhere given the situations she had to deal with on a daily basis. What I have the biggest problem with is that this book/her blogs are put out as truth. There were several times she claimed that American Soldiers killed people she knew. The only proof she had of this was heresay, and she didn't go into the circumstances leading up to these people's death. So in her writing it seemed to come across as U.S. Soldiers were just indiscriminately killing Iraqis (young & old) instead of setting up the situation that maybe these people were caught in the cross fire of a firefight between U.S. forces and insurgents.Either way, I could respect her disdain and hatred of the American Soldiers if she showed the same contempt and hatred for the insurgents, terrorists and her fellow Iraqis who were participating in the sectarian violence that plaqued Iraq after Saddam's fall. Instead she would mention car bombs and the like but never ranted about the perpetrators of those acts. The book had a forward by an elderly fellow who had acted as a human shield at the beginning of the war (he wasn't Iraqi). So it started the book off with a feeling of anti-American rhetoric. The most disturbing thing to me was at the end of the book there is a timeline of events and on September 10, 2007, this book claims that the U.S. Military arrested an 8 year old girl in Mosul and that she was only released after many people protested outside of the builidng the was being held.Now I'm a vet of the U.S. Air Force. I did not support the Iraq War nor am I a fan of G.W. Bush or his administration. So for people who may think I'm a conservative with an agenda, you'd be wrong. I just think that this book is a irresponsible. What she says in her blog is being put out as fact. If the book only dealt with her thoughts and feelings that would be one thing, but she spoke many times of political things she didn't know anything about and her stories were never corroborated with any reliable outside sources who may have witnessed the shootings or deaths she spoke of.If you really want to read this, get it from your library and read it for free.

Although it was so very sad, it made me think about how we take our every day life for granted. We always have clean water and electricity. Iraq wasn't a third world country far from it. What a pointless war, so many lifes lost. With all the bombing, lack of electricity, it is amazing that her exam marks were excellant. This book should be avaliable in all schools in the uk so that teenagercan see how much lifes are affected by the mistake of war and how luckly they are.

It was a very fragmented and repetitive account. The girl was evidently from a wealthy family however did not comment on Hussain's atrocities. She would have known about this.

Easy to read , holds your interest and provides a look into the life of a family affected by the war,

Great book, timely delivery.

On the one hand, you have to be ready for the format of this book. It is indeed a blog, with all the unevenness, brevity, and extemporaneity that this implies, especially when it comes from a teenager. On the other hand, this is a remarkable, personal account of the very human effects of war. Hadiya (the author) is in many ways so "normal," concerned with school, friends, her family, and watching the same t.v. shows as Americans. And yet her life is marked by explosions that shatter her windows, electricity that is off more often than not, thus impeding her studies, and by deaths of her family members and friends' relations. One salient point of this narrative is that, regardless of the large-scale politics and military tactics involved, the bottom line is that life is terribly interrupted and derogated for millions of people just trying to carry on with their lives.Hadiya is quite an insightful and humorous writer, which makes the book enjoyable. She will mock herself and be playful in her posts. But also, her black humor indicates the very bleak conditions that never become quite normal for her. When her sister reads a book about time travel and says that she wants to live in the future, Hadiya writes, "Why would anyone want to live in the future since everything is only going to get worse?" (p. 158). One post she signs, "Your lost friend from where Iraq once was" (p. 137). Often, the political analysis that comes from a teenager is remarkable: "If it is getting better, then why don't we have water and oil while we live in a country of oil and we have two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates? We are in the third year of the war. Three years and the war does not end. So when you want to help the Iraqi people. don't send your cousins and sons to fight because they fight us not for us" (p. 74).In sum, this book is well worth reading as a first-hand narrative of the effects of the Iraqi war upon those who have the war in their backyards and have not the luxury of distance.