Addicted to Iraq: A Photographer’s Eyewitness Report

Ashley Gilbertson photo of Ziad Sabah Jasim

Ashley Gilbertson is back safely in New York now and did not want to go back to the war in Iraq. But he needed to.

He writes, “I didn’t want to go back. When I began reporting from Iraq in 2002, I was still a wild and somewhat naïve twenty-four-year-old kid. Five years later, I was battle-weary. I had been there longer than the American military and had kept returning long after most members of the “coalition of the willing” had pulled out. Iraq had become my initiation, my rite of passage, but instead of granting me a new sense of myself and a new identity, Iraq had become my identity. Without Iraq, I was nothing. Just another photographer hanging around New York…”

Read his harrowing account as he witnesses first-hand the agonies and the mistakes of the war in Iraq.

[Via: The Virginia Quarterly Review]
Photo: Ashley Gilbertson

Published by Chris Malinao

Chris teaches Lightroom as workflow software to photography students at the FPPF, Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation. He also teaches smartphone photography.