More Baghdad bloggers

Aljazeera.net, the online service of the Arabic TV station al Jazeera, posted a good article to its website today on bloggers operating in Iraq today. It quotes Salam Pax, the "Bagdhad blogger" who helped bring blogging to worldwide attention during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But it makes it clear blogging in Iraq didn't end when his first blog went on hiatus during the breakdown of civil order in Iraq a year after the invasion. Even Salam Pax is back, with a blog called "Shut Up, You Fat Whiner" that's been up on Blogspot intermittently since the late summer of 2004.

Bloggers, according to Aljazeera.net, can "give a voice to the community that they say often goes unheard in Western media." The difference is palpable:

Salam Adil, 38, an Iraqi blogger who lives in the United Kingdom, says: "I compared reporting from the BBC and the British newspapers to the [Iraqi] blogs and there is a world of difference.

"It is as if the Western media are on a different planet," he told Aljazeera.net.

The ongoing disturbances since the partial destruction of the al-Askari shrine last week have been particularly hard for Western -- or Iraqi -- news media to cover. And bloggers were able to report from places the journalists couldn't get to. But they reflect the divisions in Iraqi society. Says Aljazeera.net:

Although the blogs have helped Iraqis communicate their hopes for Iraq’s future, they don’t always speak with the same voice, and there is often much debate, with conspiracy theories and humour thrown in.

Blogger Hammorabi wrote that the "barbaric and savage attack on the Shrine of Imam Al-Hassan Al-Askari in Samarra is a continuation of the barbarism of the Saudi Wahhabi terrorism".

But A Free Iraqi blamed the violence on politicians who "keep inflaming those already existing divisions for their own benefit, as they represent nothing but ethnic and sectarian hatred".

At the bottom of the story are links to 10 bloggers (Zeyad, Baghdad Treasure, 24 Steps to Liberty, Fayrouz Hancock, Riverbend, Hammorabi, Salam Pax, Salam Adil, A Free Iraqi and Iraq Blog Count). I've been spending way too much time surfing them, and al Jazeera's right: They give a picture of life in Iraq that not even Juan Cole can get at and the commercial Western media can no longer even try.