WSJ's Farnaz Fassihi's "private" e-mail dispatch from Baghdad

[Search Party]

http://www.loureed.com/new/news/articles/farnaz.html

found this on Lou Reed's website:

<snip>
Fassihi is the Wall Street Journal's correspondent in Baghdad. A few days ago she wrote a private e-mail to friends and family describing both her life as a reporter ("Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest") and the situation there (her conclusion: "If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat'").

<snip>
It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster.

<snip>

[Cocoa]

1. this is the consensus view of life in Iraq

especially bad since this summer it seems.

Even worse than the reporters, the plight of ordinary Iraqis who happen to be Christian or Jewish has gotten especially grave.