Book description
Zahra, aged 3, and Hawra, just a few months old were the only survivors
of a missile strike in Baghdad in 2003. Their parents and their five
siblings all died. Unable to have children herself, Hala Jaber, an
award-winning foreign correspondent, was determined to do all she could
to help them. Sent to Iraq by the Sunday Times to cover the war, the
last thing she expected was to find herself trying to save two little
girls who had lost everything. But what happened next tells us far more
about that conflict than any news bulletin ever could. Being a Lebanese
Muslim, as well as the employee of a London paper, Hala is in the
privileged position of being able to straddle two very different worlds
and explain one to the other, and her beautifully written and deeply
moving account affords a genuinely fresh insight into the Iraq war and
its terrible human cost.
Praise for The Flying Carpet to Baghdad
:
‘I read the book in one sitting and confess I cried more than once.
(...) Jaber’s story doesn’t tie it all up with a neat pink ribbon, but
it is all the more telling and universal for that.’ - The Sunday
Times
‘nothing I have read compares to Hala Jaber’s mesmerising account of
how her longing for a baby drew her into an intense, often agonising,
involvement with two little Iraqi sisters orphaned by a U. S missile
strike’ -The Daily Mail
‘Far from the usual gung-ho memoirs by war correspondents, this is a
heart-rending and highly personal story by an incredibly brave woman.’-
Christina Lamb, author of The Africa House
and The Sewing Circles of Herat
Hala Jaber was born in West Africa and grew up in the Lebanon, where
her family still lives. She began her journalistic career in the Press
Association Bureau in Beirut. Twice named Foreign Correspondent of the
Year at the British Press Awards in both 2005 and 2006, she has been
honoured by Amnesty International and in 2007 won the Martha Gellhorn
Prize for Journalism. She lives in London.
