Our women at the front

In the horror that is the Iraq war reporters usually broadcast from the safety of the vast Green Zone where Coalition civilians eat, sleep, make policy and issue statements. What we see on television are pictures taken by non-white photographers; the face-to-camera commentary usually comes from within the Zone. We can only surmise what life is like for Iraqis and along with the guessing there creeps in an I-don’t-want-to see-anymore fatigue.

Now comes Lynne O’Donnell who, as Joseph Conrad insisted about good writing, above all makes us see. A foreign correspondent with considerable experience in China, she now works for Agence France-Presse in Hong Kong. In 2003 O’Donnell found herself in the northern city of Mosul a few weeks after the American invasion of Iraq. There she met two English women, married to Iraqis, who had lived in Iraq for about 28 years. The meeting was accidental but good reporters see and take their chances. Although she says she does not want to ‘rake over the coals of the political manipulations and machinations that led to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq’, O’Donnell does just that at just the right length. Her bibliography lists the books and articles you can read to educate yourself on Iraq; but most of all, she says, ‘I wished to investigate the life of ordinary Iraqi people through the eyes of two women whose perspectives straddle the cultural, racial, linguistic, religious and geographic lines dividing Iraq itself.’

Pauline and Margaret were northern working-class girls, from Lancashire and Durham respectively, when they met their future husbands, who were studying in England. By the late Seventies the women had travelled to Mosul with them. Although they immediately moved straight to the comfortable Westernised social apex in Iraq — Pauline’s husband was a British-certified doctor and Margaret’s an academic and member of Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party, who became president of Mosul University — the two women might just as well have moved to Neptune.