From the Publisher
From public radio journalist Michael Goldfarb comes the most stirring narrative to emerge from the Second Gulf War, from the frontlines of battle, to the home of an Iraqi Kurdish family, and into the hearts of two men from different cultures whose friendship and passion for freedom will inspire all. Ahmad's War, Ahmad's Peace is Goldfarb's moving tribute to Ahmad Shawkat, the Iraqi Kurd who served as his translator during "Major Combat Operations," whose life's work was to promote freedom, and who was ultimately murdered during the American occupation. Goldfarb recounts his powerful relationship with Ahmad and introduces readers to the life of a true Iraqi hero. Eighteen years old when the Ba'ath Party seized control of Iraq, Ahmad was imprisoned and tortured twice by Saddam Hussein's regime, was forced to fight in the Iraqi army against Iran, and was banished from his hometown of Mosul for his anti-Saddam political writings. Just as he began to taste freedom with the fall of Saddam and his large family's return to Mosul, Ahmad was murdered for publicly decrying Islamic terror. As Goldfarb investigates his friend's murder, he mourns this loss and contemplates what dangers await the Iraqi people in their uncertain future.
The New York Times -
Dexter Filkin
Goldfarb does a fine job of recounting the heady days of Mosul's liberation, and the collapse of the American-backed efforts to create a liberal society before the onslaught of the insurgents. That failure has been documented elsewhere, but it is particularly stinging to witness through the eyes of someone like Shawkat, who tried so hard to construct a more humane Iraq.
Publishers Weekly
Ahmad Shawkat, an educated Iraqi Kurd, was imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime for his dissident writings, fought in the Iran-Iraq war and endured the misery of life under the U.N. sanctions. Public radio correspondent Goldfarb hired him as a translator when he was covering the 2003 invasion and found him to be almost a poster person for the Bush administration's vision of a reconstructed Iraq-a secular, cultured, tolerant intellectual with a fierce commitment to democratic principles. Shawkat seemed poised to flourish after Saddam's fall when he received a grant from the occupation authorities to start a political newspaper and a "democracy training institute." But, Goldfarb says, the return of a corrupt ex-Baathist establishment under American patronage and the rise of Islamic militancy dashed Shawkat's hopes for a liberal democracy, and his editorials against these two tendencies finally got him assassinated. Goldfarb draws a delicate portrait of his friend and of the growing chaos and disillusionment of Iraqi society, where Shawkat's idealistic but rudderless writings-he named his newspaper Without Direction-were pushed aside by hardening attitudes. Shawkat emerges as a tragic figure, a voice of individual conscience in a country still ruled by rigid ideology and tribal loyalties. Photos. Agent, Ron Goldfarb. (Aug. 22) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Veteran NPR correspondent Goldfarb has written a moving story of the life and death of his friend and translator, Ahmad Shawkat, a linguistically gifted Shi'ite Kurd. Shawkat emerges as a dedicated and highly intelligent guide to the torture dungeons in which he had suffered under Saddam Hussein and the complex and damaged society under the occupation. Shawkat ultimately felt "keen disappointment" in America's refusal to heed warnings of the impending insurgency. Ultimately, he was assassinated as he left the newspaper offices where he served as editor. His story is an exciting account of Kurdish survival, a poignant justification for intellectual dissent against totalitarianism, and a depiction of active faith in the universal relevance of democracy. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A moving tribute, by NPR correspondent Goldfarb, to his Kurdish translator, guide and friend, an early victim of post-conquest terror in Iraq. Ahmad Shawkat was a man of parts: a secular Muslim happily married to a believer, frequently imprisoned and tortured by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime, he was a lecturer in histopathology and anatomy at the University of Mosul who also "lived the life of an old-fashioned man of letters, writing fiction and criticism and giving lectures to his medical students on literature." He was also a fine translator, Goldfarb was glad to learn, able to give an accurate sense of a document or communication that needed only a gloss, but also able to add nuance and shading to a statement when the situation called. In these pages, Ahmad keeps Goldfarb alive over the course of a season of war, dodging bullets fired from all sides; he also takes him into territory that few other correspondents got to, where he was able to gauge Iraqi suspicions of their supposed liberators, the Americans. (Says one Iraqi man, "I know and I understand very well that there are no mass destructions weapons in Iraq. And Mr. Bush knows that very well. . . . They will find nothing." Another wonders why anyone in the American government would take Ahmed Chalabi seriously.) When the Americans take control, Ahmad secures a grant to open an institute to teach his fellow Iraqis about democracy and founds a journal, writing editorials that displease the "arrogant political careerists" of the occupation government as much as they do hard-core Ba'athists. In the end, Ahmad is shot down in the street, forever silenced. Goldfarb makes plain that this was exactly the sort of man the new Iraqneeds, never mind that the American occupation government "seemed hell-bent on making sure the Iraq that Ahmad envisioned would never exist."For that, Goldfarb blames the Bush administration, closing with a reasoned but white-hot denunciation of American imperialism. One of the best of the many books to emerge from the Iraq invasion.
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