Iraqi blogger flees her 'long nightmare'

THE Brontës turned her on to writing. Chaos in Iraq was her subject. But now Iraq's best-known blogger is leaving her beloved land for an uncertain future in an unknown country.

The "long nightmare" of trying to survive amid the "car bombs and militias" has finally persuaded Riverbend - as the anonymous 27-year-old computer programmer calls herself - to follow hundreds of thousands of her compatriots into exile.

Her departure will be missed by many - although George Bush and Tony Blair will not be among them.

She writes in her valedictory entry of the "overwhelming sense of injustice" at having to leave her country "simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it".

Riverbend's blog, called "Baghdad Burning", was angrily opposed to the British-American occupation of Iraq.

For four years she chronicled what it was like to live in Baghdad under foreign rule and as her country descended into internecine strife.

She wrote in English with a fluency that would put many native speakers to shame. This ensured that her blog was soon one of the best read accounts of the war among western readers keen for an insider's unvarnished view of a conflict that was much-spun by outside pundits.

Her latest entry fulminates against "a handful of expats who haven't been to the country in decades [pretending] to know more about it than people actually living here".

Riverbend felt that much western media coverage focused on politics and rarely touched on the reality of daily life in Iraq. So, with bitterness leavened by humour, she wrote about the lack of security and the shortage of basic necessities such as electricity and water. She chose to remain anonymous because it kept her secure from retribution - whether from political parties, religious figures or "common thugs".

Born into an upper-middle-class family of mixed Sunni-Shia origins, she acquired her English during a long stay abroad in her childhood and was an avid reader, devouring novels by Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.

More than anyone, though, it was the Bront sisters who inspired her. It is easy to see why: like her, they had passion, even if they wrote about romantic love while she wrote about sectarian carnage and political folly. Riverbend brought international attention to Iraqi blogging. Her cyber diary has been edited into an award-winning book. A New York theatre company adapted her blog into a play that was performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Unsurprisingly, Riverbend, an idealistic Iraqi nationalist, has her critics, with some readers even questioning whether she is an Iraqi woman. Detractors have accused her of being biased, anti-American and lamenting the ousting of Saddam Hussein.

The New York Review of Books recently agreed Riverbend had her limitations, but said the "mistakes of the young Baghdad woman" made her narrative worth reading.

Apparently oblivious of Saddam's chemical weapons attacks on Iraq's Kurds, she wrote at one point: "Some would say that they [the Kurds] had complete rights even before the war."

Answering her critics in an al-Jazeera interview, she said: "One thing that bothers me is that people equate being anti-occupation with anti-American. I'm not anti-American - I know many wonderful Americans and correspond with them. I am, however, anti-occupation."

Her blog takes Washington to task for claiming it wanted to give Iraq a democracy transplant by pointing out that her rights as a woman have been eroded by the rise of Islamic fundamentalists backed by the political parties the US brought to power.

As for bias, she pointed out she is a blogger, not a dispassionate journalist. "That objective lack of emotion is impossible because a blog in itself stems from passion - the need to sit for hours at one's computer ... trying to communicate ideas, thoughts, fears and frustrations to the world."

Her latest blog entry focuses on the pain of joining the Iraqi exodus: the difficulty of choosing what to pack; whether to make the perilous overland trip to Syria or Jordan, or to risk the equally dangerous dash to Baghdad airport and fly.

What awaits after arrival in either of those neighbouring countries, each "overflowing with Iraqi refugees", each a "transit to something else", she wonders. And will the family home and belongings still be there "when and if we come back"?

The Iraq war has spawned the biggest movement of people in the Middle East since the Palestinian refugee crisis in 1948. More than a million Iraqi refugees are in Syria, a million more have fled to Jordan and almost two million have been displaced inside Iraq.

Riverbend ends: "It's difficult to decide which is more frightening - car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain."