By Sinan Antoon, Iraqi author, Published on December 16, 2019, by The New York Times.

Safa al-Sarray was killed when Iraqi forces fired a tear-gas canister at his head.

Iraqis have been protesting since early October against the dysfunctional and corrupt political system installed by the United States after the 2003 occupation. Unlike previous waves of protests that began in 2011, this protest was spontaneous and not organized by any party.
The most common and passionate slogan throughout these protests has been, “We want a homeland.” It reflected the anger and alienation Iraqis felt toward …

By Isabella Hammad, for The New York Times, June 22, 2019
Adam Dannoun, the protagonist of Elias Khoury’s powerful new novel, calls himself a child of the ghetto. He does not mean the Warsaw ghetto — although, growing up in the newly established state of Israel, he allows his university colleagues to make that assumption. He means the “ghetto” of the Palestinian town of Lydda, created by Jewish forces who uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinians on a death march in one of the bloodiest massacres of the 1948 Nakba. (That …

A review by Elliot Ackerman for The New York Times Review of Books, published February 26th, 2019
How many times can you read about barrel bombs falling on civilians in Aleppo or Islamic State execution squads or sarin gas attacks before the sheer quantity of incidents denudes each of meaning? The facts, devoid of a narrative, lose their weight. That’s the power of mass violence: its ability to transform specific loss into general loss, numbing our collective consciousness. This is why novelists like Khalifa are so critical in these times. They …

This original contribution by Sinan Antoon was published on March 19th, 2018, in The New York Times.
When I was 12, Saddam Hussein, vice president of Iraq at the time, carried out a huge purge and officially usurped total power. I was living in Baghdad then, and I developed an intuitive, visceral hatred of the dictator early on. That feeling only intensified and matured as I did. In the late 1990s, I wrote my first novel, “I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody,” about daily life under Saddam’s authoritarian regime. Furat, the narrator, was a young college …

“Living With Death in Baghdad”
This piece was written by Sinan Antoon, for the New York Times, published on July 20th, 2016
Excerpts below.
When I was growing up in Baghdad, my favorite part of the city was Karrada, the neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Tigris where a bomb went off on July 3, killing at least 250 people. I would often go there just to stroll down its elegant streets. The main one was lined with stylish boutiques and stores selling delicious fresh juice and sandwiches. Attractive women and handsome …

“U.S. Warns Egypt’s Generals Against Jeopardizing ‘Second Chance’ at Democracy.

“The armed forces remained committed to what it considered the legitimacy of the ballot box until this presumed legitimacy moved against its own purpose,” General el-Sisi said. “The Egyptian people were concerned that the tools of the state could be used against them. The armed forces had to make a choice, seeing the danger of deepened polarization.”

The general said that the military had offered Mr. Morsi the option of a referendum on whether he should stay in power, but that the deeply unpopular president had refused.

Painful as it was to see the democratic process interrupted so soon after the revolution that overthrew the longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the military’s action was necessary.”