Current Affairs:Early on in his account of his experiences in Iraq, RTÉ correspondent Richard Downes recounts the day he was almost killed by a US bombing raid. Fleeing the besieged city of Baghdad for the safety of Jordan a few weeks into the invasion, Downes and his driver passed through a Sunni area on the outskirts of the city.
Without warning, US bombs came pouring from the sky like rain. Downes began to write a farewell letter to his wife, certain he wouldn't survive the onslaught. In the event, the drones and bombers above spared his vehicle, and he made it to Jordan.
It is all too easy for war correspondents to paint themselves as a chief protagonist in the conflicts they cover, to focus on their experiences in the war zone, how they suffered while bearing witness. It is to Downes's credit that after describing his own dramatic brush with death, In Search of Iraq focuses instead on the people of that country. He functions as a guide rather than a hero, and we learn about the country as he does. Downes worked in Iraq as the BBC's Iraq correspondent in the late 1990s, and his subsequent experiences of the war are informed by his knowledge of the country under sanctions and Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. When he returns regularly over the years, in advance of the war and in its chaotic aftermath, it is to a perennially worsening situation.
BUT THE MOST admirable thing about In Search of Iraq is how Downes finds the country, and charts its tragedy, through the stories of the various friends and contacts that he made over the years. So the first half of the book is brought to life by the presence of his friend and protector Abu Aseel, a Shia Muslim. Aseel is an extraordinary character, a first-rate fixer and organiser, a primary source of information, whose family virtually adopt Downes. Aseel's plight after the invasion, when he and his family were forced to abandon their home for safety in the Shia south, and who are now desperate to leave the country for Europe, is being replicated all across the Iraqi middle classes.
Then there is Mohammed Darweesh, a Sunni Muslim and unlikely Joyce scholar, who worked with Downes at the BBC office in the late 1990s as a translator. It is through the intellectual Darweesh that we discover the multi- denominational city of Mosul, where Shia women pray to the Virgin Mary in Christian churches, where Sunnis and Sufis live side by side. Downes also works with the improbably named David George, an Iraqi Christian who has been forced, like many of the other Christians, to leave Iraq.
It is in these passages that Downes reveals the diversity in Iraqi life, a side of the country entirely elided in the reporting of Saddam's brutality, US incompetence and Sunni/Shia rivalry.
Downes spends time with both British and US soldiers, and their behaviour is full of the predictable trademarks of imperial ignorance that blight their efforts in the country - the British soldiers have minimal interaction with Iraqis, the US troops can think only in terms of good guys and bad guys.
Downes isn't the greatest prose stylist, his writing sometimes stutters when it needs to flow, and he can occasionally be hokey, but he fills the book with memorable characters and telling detail. It is, most of all, a thoroughly humanising account of a country and its people, a people who have too long been subjected to Western arrogance and ignorance. One of the most defining comments, illustrative of the struggle Iraq faces to survive, is when the Joyce scholar Mohammed Darweesh tells Downes: "Reading is a thing of the past, Richard . . . I am too nervous to read."
Davin O'Dwyer is a freelance journalist
In Search of Iraq: Baghdad to Babylon By Richard Downes New Island, 268pp. €14.95