Here’s an article from Saturday’s Wall Street Journal by Sarmad Ali, a young Iraqi journalist living in the U.S.:
About 5 o’clock on a mid-December morning, I was awakened by a call from my brother in Iraq. “Dad is missing,†he said. He was upset and some of his anger spilled out at me: “You should be here,†he shouted. “You don’t seem to care.â€
My father had left home in Baghdad that morning to go to the auto-repair shop across town where he works. Fifteen minutes after he left, car bombs exploded on his route to work and he hasn’t been seen since.
His disappearance set off a desperate search by my family through the netherworld of war-torn Baghdad. It also put me in the agonizing position of trying to help my family with the violent dislocations of civil war — over the phone, from thousands of miles away.
The rest. You can also hear Ali reading a version here.
(Thanks to Saheli, a friend of Ali’s friend Cyrus Farivar, for pointing this out.)