Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Her promiscuity is legendary: Roman writers recounted salacious tales of how the empress used to escape the palace to prostitute herself in a brothel, or tried to marry her lover while her husband was still alive. The tragedy of Messalina, the third wife of the emperor Claudius, is almost too perfect. Read together as a collection – in English, 20 years after the invasion, its author still anonymous – Shalash the Iraqi reveals a side, not to mention a sense of humour, of Iraq that has been woefully absent from Western ideas of the country.īy Megan Gibson Messalina: A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery by Honor Cargill-MartinĮveryone loves a good sex scandal – and historians are no exception. Describing the various speaking styles of Iraqi politicians, Shalash writes that then prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, “talks like he just ate a few expensive dictionaries and is about to lose his lunch”. A civil war was brewing in the already besieged country and yet Shalash’s regular updates – which featured an eccentric cast of real and imagined characters including corrupt politicians, bumbling grifters and local oddballs – painted a surreal and wickedly funny picture of life in Baghdad.

In the autumn of 2005, more than two years after the US-led invasion of iraq began and on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s trial, a blog documenting daily life in Thawra City, a densely packed Shia suburb of Baghdad, was born. Written by the pseudonymous Shalash, the blog’s inventive (and often invented) dispatches went about as viral as was possible in Iraq at the time, given that access to regular electricity, let alone the internet, was patchy. Shalash the Iraqi by Shalash, translated by Luke Leafgren

Underneath by Michael Cargill