Under the pseudonym, 'Riverbend', a twenty-five year old woman from Iraq started a blog in the year 2003. In her online updates, Riverbend wrote about the on goings around her in the city of Baghdad. What was once her home, got transformed into a shattered rubble of a city after the war and the invasion by the United States of America. Her accounts are mostly pertaining to regular life and how it was impacted over the years of political turmoil. The suspended rights of the people, especially the restrictions imposed on the Iraqi women, are at the heart of this blog. Getting electricity for a couple of hours only in the middle of the night, the twenty-four hour compulsion of being masked in a hijab and the inability to bury a dead relative because of packed Muslim cemeteries are basic day-to-day occurrences the young woman wrote about. Her retelling are punctuated with strong opinions she held about everything from George Bush's term to the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The blog updates of this unnamed woman have been compiled into a book of insightful narratives and is considered to contain the most authentic details about the state of affairs in Iraq through the eyes of a woman.
