NIR ROSEN is recently back from a six week trip to seven of Iraq’s provinces. He will discuss post civil war Iraq and also his experiences reporting on Sunni-Shiite strife in Lebanon and on the situation in Afghanistan.
NIR ROSEN is a writer, journalist, film-maker and Fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. His newest book, Aftermath, is about sectarianism, civil war, occupation, resistance, terrorism and counterinsurgency from Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan. He recently returned from a six week journey throughout Iraq. He has spent over 36 months working in occupied Iraq, four months in Afghanistan and has also worked in Somalia, the Congo, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon, where he lived with his wife and son. His work has been published by The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and similar publications. He has filmed for several documentaries. One of them, “No End in Sight,” about the occupation of Iraq, won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His book on Iraq, In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, was published by Free Press in 2006 and was released in paperback in the spring of 2008. He is a frequent guest on CNN, CNN International, al Jazeera International, and various other television and radio shows.
HIS NEW BOOK: An extraordinary feat of reporting, Aftermath follows the contagious spread of radicalism and sectarian violence that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ensuing civil war have unleashed in the Muslim world. Nir Rosen has spent nearly a decade among warriors and militants who have been challenging American power in the Muslim world. In Aftermath, he tells their story, showing the other side of the U.S. war on terror, traveling from the battle-scarred streets of Baghdad to the alleys, villages, refugee camps, mosques, and killing grounds of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and finally Afghanistan, where Rosen has a terrifying encounter with the Taliban as their “guest,” and witnesses the new Obama surge fizzling in southern Afghanistan. Rosen was one of the few Westerners to venture inside the mosques of Baghdad to witness the first stirrings of sectarian hatred in the months after the U.S. invasion. He shows how weapons, tactics, and sectarian ideas from the civil war in Iraq penetrated neighboring countries and threatened their stability, especially Lebanon and Jordan, where new jihadist groups mushroomed. Moreover, he shows that the spread of violence at the street level is often the consequence of specific policies hatched in Washington, D.C. Rosen offers a seminal and provocative account of the surge, told from the perspective of U.S. troops on the ground, the Iraqi security forces, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents that were both allies and adversaries. He also tells the story of what happened to these militias once they outlived their usefulness to the Americans. Aftermath is both a unique personal history and an unsparing account of what America has wrought in Iraq and the region. The result is a hair-raising, 360-degree view of the modern battlefield its consequent humanitarian catastrophe, and the reality of counterinsurgency.
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