On air: Are you celebrating Iraq’s National Sovereignty Day?

Here’s a quote from the first e-mail i opened today :

“the atmosphere down here is feverish and electric, like a huge celebration or something, there’s a mixture of joy, pride, fear, and apprehension.”

The e-mailer is Lubna, our long time WHYS friend and contributor, studying medicine in Baghdad. For many of the WHYS community we’ve seen the story in Iraq through Lubna’s eyes.

Dan’s the man…

Our colleague Dan Damon usually sits on the next desk to us from WHYS, but this week has gone to great lengths to get away from us. He’s been hosting a series of excellent shows from Baghdad for our sister programme “World Update”.  Dan, like us in Beijing, has been Twittering away (“dandamon”)

Letters from Baghdad

There are several of you in Iraq who subscribe the WHYS Daily Email. I asked you all if you’d send me your feelings on the 5th anniversary of the war. These are the replies I’ve received. The rest of you are welcome to leave comments or questions for Rania, Lubna and Zainab. They’ve promised to reply.

How do you recover from a violent loss?

It’s hard enough to lose a loved one, but does knowing that they died in a senseless, violent way make it harder for those left behind.  A number of you have been responding to Lubna, since she wrote to us about her neighbour Ali being killed by a bomb. It followed her almost being killed herself, by a roadside bomb a few days earlier. Some of you have written about how you’ve dealt with extreme trauma, and we’d like to pick up on this.

Lubna – cheating death.

I’m sure you all know Lubna in Baghdad. She is one of our most loyal contributors on World Have Your Say. Today she sent me a message to say that she narrowly missed two roadside bombs and that she had cheated death twice. Here is her message.

Lubna, the Rabbi and all of you

UPDATE: An hour so ago, we recorded a conversation between WHYS regular Lubna in Baghdad and Rabbi David Rosen in Jerusalem. We’ll play it and then you can speak to them about what you’ve heard. Issues they raise are what Islam and Judaism have in common, when criticism of Israel is anti-semitic and how to bring peace to the Middle East. It’s fascinating. Tune in if you can.  (For Olympics see the post below.)