Middle East Diary - McClatchy Newspapers

Apologies for the long absence. I've just returned to Egypt and will start posting again tomorrow.

Greetings, everybody. Apologies for the lag between posts. Since I last wrote, I've left Baghdad, spent a couple of days in Cairo and now I'm in the United States for a week or so. I'll try to keep the blog updated, but the next week might have only sporadic postings.

Please take a moment to study the photo to the left.

Baghdad is swathed in a cloud of dust today as the sandstorm season begins. The entire capital is an eerie orange color, with fine particles of sand that leave everybody feeling icky and grainy. At times, the roaring winds even drown out the perpetual hum of electrical generators and the booms of roadside bombs.

Hearings began in Baghdad today in the case of the first civilian contractor to face court-martial proceedings since a 2006 decision by Congress that gave the military the authority to prosecute crimes committed by civilians working for the armed forces. The AP noted that this is the first such military prosecution since the Vietnam War.

The sounds of sobbing drifted from the open door of a rundown home in Sadr City today. Inside, dozens of black-draped women sat cross-legged on the floor, weeping and beating their chests over the latest death to shake this besieged Baghdad slum with a population of about 3 million.

Well, I'm back in Baghdad, this time on a brief trip to fill in while our Baghdad bureau chief, Leila Fadel, heads Stateside to pick up her much-deserved George Polk award for best foreign reporting.

Pakinam Amer, an intrepid Egyptian journalist who has worked with several international media outlets, just wrote a brave and candid blog post called: "To veil or not to veil, that is the goddamn question."

It was confusing. Cairo's notorious traffic snarls were gone, many shops and businesses were closed, the universities were empty. Riot police fanned out across the sprawling capital. And yet most of the demonstrations that had been scheduled to accompany Sunday's general workers' strike never really got off the ground, either because of low attendance or security concerns.

Egypt is roiling with a dire food crisis, impending local elections and a massive general strike planned for the weekend.

If you could pose a question to al Qaida's No. 2 leader, what would you ask?

Below is the third letter home from J, my best friend and college roommate who is being deployed to Iraq soon as part of the National Guard. In J's last letter, her medical unit (which is going to be attached to a military police unit in Baghdad) was training at a U.S. base where soldiers learn some Arabic, undergo combat training and simulate the conditions of a base in Iraq.

The Arab Summit came and went in Damascus over the weekend, with the same showdowns and no-shows that always mar the annual gathering of the 22 Arab League member nations. I managed to escape Syrian media purgatory and avoid covering the Damascus summit, but here's all you need to know about the meeting, with thanks to the AP and AFP wire services:

A Marine friend of mine is working on a memoir of his time in Iraq's deadly Anbar province. He's struggling with combat stress and it seems that writing has become therapeutic for him, a way to confront all the transgressions, killings, ambushes, close calls.

There's so much to love about Kadhemiya.

Couldn't find any Peeps, bunnies or dyed eggs, but my favorite bakery in Baghdad did have these Easter cakes for sale. We also passed a couple of churches that were crowded for Easter service today.

A beautiful Baghdad morning. I'm riding shotgun with Hussein, who's behind the wheel of a 1983 Toyota hoopty. The air conditioner is broken. Windows down, clear skies, Hussam al Rassam on the radio singing about his lying lover.

One of the best parts of staying in this particular hotel in Baghdad is the first-floor cafeteria -- not because of the food (it's horrendous), but because of the irreverent, hilarious guys from Sadr City and Doura who work behind the counter.

These are some of the descriptions several of my American friends and colleagues offered about Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's landmark speech on race relations: riveting, amazing, honest, brilliant. One warned that it might bring me to tears.

What is Iraq like five years since the U.S.-led invasion?

The other day I was interviewing a young Iraqi woman I'll call K about the lack of services in Baghdad when the conversation veered off track and we began discussing her family's unusual background and the problems it's caused.

Vice President Dick Cheney didn’t even give us time to recover from McCain’s visit before popping up unannounced in Baghdad today. Journalists traveling with the veep reported that he made at least six stealthy moves in and around the Green Zone, with details trickling out only after he’d departed the undisclosed locations.

Abu Nour, the silver-haired Iraqi manager of the hotel where our Baghdad bureau is located, made a confession over dinner tonight.

Earlier this week, the Bloomberg news service ran a commentary by George Walden, a British former diplomat who's involved in international literary circles, about a new $50,000 prize that supports fiction-writing in the Arab world.

Iraq is so all-consuming -- this week alone brought us gruesome hostage news, the death of an archbishop, a spate of suicide bombings, a spike in U.S. troop casualties -- that I thought it might be time to check in on what's happening in the rest of the Middle East.

Below is the second letter home from J, my best friend and college roommate who is being deployed to Iraq soon as part of the National Guard. Right now, her medical unit (which is going to be attached to a military police unit in Baghdad) is training at a U.S. base where soldiers learn some Arabic, undergo combat training and simulate the conditions of a base in Iraq.

I'm off to Baghdad next week so today I went to the Iraqi Embassy in Cairo to pick up my visa. The embassy is located on a busy traffic circle with very little security; certainly nothing like the massive blast walls that shield buildings in Iraq.