Latest from McClatchy's Iraqi Bloggers: The War as a Hollywood Movie

By: E&P Staff For several weeks now, E&P has been featuring postings from blog Inside Iraq, where McClatchy's Iraqi staffers in Baghdad often provide a remarkably frank and moving picture of their life and work.

Full names are never given for security reasons. The following, titled "To Be A Part of a Movie," was posted this week by "Correspondent Jenan."
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If you were in the new Iraq it is normal to enter into the action that you always watch in movies. Sometimes you find yourself as a hostage, sometimes you are chased by an anonymous group that patrols the streets of Baghdad every minute. You are even shot at, or may become a number in the casualties of an explosion.

But unfortunately sometimes you die. That means you can?t tell your story.

Don?t worry; there will be witnesses whom are considered as secondary heroes too. In the evening when you gather with your family members, each of them has a story that he needs to tell - with electricity long absent, nightly curfew and generators that sound like war drums - it is necessary as background music for our heroic movies!!

Let me tell you one of these movies.

One day, I was on my way to the University. That day I took the role of an escaped deer that runs from the wolves, who were men with masks. I thought they were trying to catch me! The wolves were riding old civilian cars and gesturing to me with their guns to stop, but as a movie heroine I refused to obey their orders and said to myself ?I am dead anyway?. no way!!? So I should die bravely like a heroine without giving up. Surrender will be useless.

Suddenly and from nowhere there was a modern car that flew like a cheetah? Alas! It comes! It comes! And all is true! I heard the sound of bullets whizzing. So I hid my head down and pushed on the brakes.

The end is come. I sniffed Death's odor.

Moments later I realized that I am still alive; so I raise my head to face my fate. There was an Asian face with big mouth shouting back?back and a gun was directed to my face. Oh God, now I see they were not chasing me, only in my mind. They were foreign private security PSDs!

And I was obstructing democracy and freedom that is already brought to us by force.

Hundreds of Iraqis were killed because they found themselves ? unfortunately -- with the military troops or private security guards in same time and place; so they paid their lives as a price for this mistake.

Can you imagine yourself participating in an epic or war movie? That's what's happening in Democratic Iraq when the new democracy and freedom entered Iraq on military tanks.

I?m wondering when will the day come that we become part of romantic or social movie?

By the way I forgot telling you that there is no difference between Saddam?s old movies and our new democratic movies -- only the director.