An 'ordinary day' in Baghdad

The BBC program, "World Have Your Say," posts a missive from one of its regular contributors today. A woman named Lubna set out to school to take an obstetrics exam.

As we got closer to the district in which my college lies, a roadside bomb has exploded at a close distance ahead of us. So we all decided to go back home. On our way back home, another roadside bomb has exploded also at a close distance behind us. I saw the other car flying in the air. So in the end we got back home. And We missed our obsestrics exam. And that’s a very ordinary day of our ordinary daily Baghdadi life.

Blogs are a good way to try to get a sense of life in Iraq. McClatchy Newspaper bureau chief Leila Fadel's Baghdad Observer is an excellent one. Last Thursday she wrote:

One of our Shiite Iraqi staffers asked if Maliki would go to Adil, a restive Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad where Sunni insurgents still operate and Shiites know they are not welcome. Maybe he can check out Hurriyah where Sunni residents have not returned. They were run out of the neighborhood in 2006 and some men were burned alive.

Maybe he can ask the more than 88,000 mostly Sunni contractors that work with the U.S. to fight Al Qaida how they feel about the reconciliation effort. Many of them are former insurgents, very few have been absorbed into the government. People complain now that many act as warlords, in each neighborhood the law is in their hands.

The blog, Healing Iraq, makes up for its inconsistent updating with an amazing number of comments for each.