Bizarre Bazaar

Hurricane Hunting

Eleanor Hong — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:46:07 -0400

People do some pretty crazy things in life -- flying straight into a hurricane is right up there. Or so I thought, until I took a flight with the US Air Force’s hurricane hunters, right into Hurricane Gustav as it...

The First Hidden Church

zzaki — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:22:22 -0400

An archaeologist in Jordan claims to have found the earliest-known Christian church anywhere in the world. I read this online in the Jordan Times while I am next door in Iraq. What is any self-respecting journalist with a persistent sense...

Mosul Memories

zzaki — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 21:51:00 -0400

I have fond memories of playing dominoes at a tea shop overlooking the Tigris River in the northern city of Mosul. It is right at the end of the iron bridge that connects the old part of the town with...

The Soccer War

MichaelJames — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:57:15 -0400

We went to an unusual soccer game this week in the small village of Multaka, 130 miles north of Baghdad. It pitted the local soccer stars against a team drawn from the 87th Infantry, the U.S. military unit that is...

Anger in Basra

zzaki — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:29:56 -0400

Kadhim Twari Sa’adoon emerged from a mosque in Hiyaniyah, one of the poorest slums in Basra, wearing his best white dishdash and tribal headdress, and saw me and my cameraman waiting, microphone at the ready. Suddenly he started shouting with...

Coming to America

zzaki — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:35:54 -0400

A little bit of Ted Kennedy came to roost in the ABC Baghdad bureau this past week. The bureau chief, Mike Gudgell, assembled all our Iraqi staff -- reporters, drivers, cooks, translators, electricians, cleaners, guards -- to explain to them...

Baghdad Real Estate

MichaelJames — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:36:11 -0400

So you want to buy a house, maybe do a little interior design work on it and flip it for a profit? The property market may not be looking too good for that in the United States these days, but...

Telling It Like It Is

ABC News — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:59:50 -0400

The whole point of being a journalist is to let the world know about stories that are important -- particularly stories where something bad is happening that could, potentially, be stopped or alleviated by outside intervention. So it has been...

ESCAPING NORTH

zzaki — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 11:12:05 -0400

We flew up to the Kurdish north of Iraq recently – it is always a welcome release for us to go up north, where security is so much better. After a day in Erbil, the main city, we drove across...

Franklin in Fallujah

ABC News — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:40:57 -0400

We were walking down the main street of Fallujah the other day -- a fact remarkable in itself, given all that has gone on in that benighted town over the past five years -- when we came across a man...