Nir Rosen is a freelance writer reporting from Iraq. He has contributed to a Columbia Journalism Review blog of reports filed from correspondents in Iraq.
One of his recent reports paints a chilling picture of life in Iraq.
The daily things the Iraqis endure -- and those that I experienced just because I looked Iraqi and then because I was a male, and a so-called "male of fighting age." My [new Iraqi] friends would ask me, "Why do Americans say `fuck' so much, what's this word `fuck?'" I heard that a few times. "Why do Americans spit so much?" They didn't know about chewing dip -- the tobacco thing. So they see Americans spitting all the time; they're going into a house on a raid, and in order to stay awake they chew dip and they're spitting constantly, spitting all over people's yards, things like that. Having to deal with the barbed wire everywhere, the tanks and Humvees blocking traffic in your roads, pointing their guns at you, firing into the air, shouting at you. It was constant humiliation and constant fear, because they control your life. They have these huge guns and you can't even communicate with them adequately. And that summer [2003], it was just unbearably hot and American soldiers were dressed in all that gear. Obviously they were not in a good mood. Iraqis had no electricity. They were in a bad mood. It was always very tense, they were always shouting at Iraqis and shouting at me sometimes. I was walking down the street toward a checkpoint once, and I heard one American soldier say to the other, "That's the biggest fucking Iraqi I ever saw." And the other soldier said, "I don't care how big he is, if he don't stop moving I'm gonna shoot him." And there were one or two other times I heard soldiers talking about shooting me, and whether it was in jest I don't know, but at least I understood and could shout, "Don't shoot, I'm an American!" Most Iraqis couldn't, and that's a very scary thing.