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Nir Rosen has been hailed by The New York Review of Books as the reporter who managed to get inside Fallujah "at a time when it was a death trap for Western reporters," and as one of the few Western reporters able to report the truth from Iraq. Still in his twenties, a freelancer who has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, Rosen speaks Iraqi-accented Arabic and has managed to report from some of the country's most dangerous locales. Even The Weekly Standard notes that "he probably has more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter."

In the Belly of the Green Bird is a searing report, unlike any other book about the American experience in Iraq. Almost everything covered in the Western media has been at least one or two steps removed from the minds and acts of the people who will determine the future of Iraq. Some of them are peaceful, some are violent. Some of them hate one another with the intensity of ancient enemies. The depth of discord between Sunnis and Shias is difficult to fathom without listening to them. Their anti-Americanism is much more recent, but not much less intense. The divisions within this cobbled-together country, much like those within Yugoslavia after Tito, are simply too intense to contain.

Selected reviews of In the Belly of the Green Bird are available below:

Publishers Weekly

Rosen minutely charts the course of Iraq's rapidly metastasizing sectarian conflict, which he observed up close from the immediate aftermath of Baghdad's fall in 2003 to the elections of January 2005. A fluent speaker of Iraqi Arabic and a freelance journalist, Rosen gained an impressive measure of access to both the Sunni and Shia resistance, dissidents and ordinary Iraqis, attending sermons at mosques and visiting tribal meeting halls across Iraq -- from Baghdad to Tikrit, Najaf and Falluja to Kirkuk.

The title is a reference to the Islamic idea that martyrs' souls are flown to heaven in the belly of a green bird, the book serves as a window onto the rhetoric, ambitions, strategies and historical context of the numerous violent groups struggling for power. From interviews with major Shia, Sunni and Kurdish players, Rosen reports that most people primarily want the U.S. out, while newly arrived foreign jihadis, radicalized by the American occupation, are at war with Christians, Jews and Shia Muslims. Despite the book's choppy chronological organization and Rosen's workmanlike prose, the end result represents brave reportage and significantly increases our understanding of what Rosen describes as an already raging civil war.

Asia Times

Nir Rosen is one of a handful of extraordinary investigative reporters who offer English-literate readers the on-the-ground reality of the war in Iraq. And the combination of virtues he brings to his work -- including his fluent, Iraqi-accented Arabic, his willingness to spend long periods in life-threatening situations, and his graceful and luminous writing style -- make him unique even among this handful.

So this book, which provides an even broader canvas than his expansive New Yorker article and his six-part Asia Times Online dispatch on Fallujah, is a welcome addition to the still-meager library of first-hand accounts of what Iraq looks like since the US invasion. Rosen's approach to journalism is reminiscent of the "atmospheric" style of movie director Robert Altman: the larger reality emerges from a collage of microscopic events -- a brief conversation between US troops and Iraqi civilians, a one-minute firefight where no one is injured, or a short outburst by a local Iraqi about life after the fall of Saddam Hussein. From these tiny building blocks emerge a portrait of the (changing ) features of Iraqi society under the pressure of -- and in reaction to -- the US occupation.

Among the noteworthy things we learn from his intense experience are some insights that are old (but enriched by the details he fills in), some that are new (and often far from what we have been led to believe by the mainstream media), some that are borrowed from other journalists (but given new life by Rosen's unique access to the everyday reality) and, most of all, many that are blue-sad portraits of the evisceration of the vibrant and varied society that once enriched Iraq and the world.

The text is so rich with these insights that a list is impossible, so I will offer only two examples. His chapter on the January 2005 elections makes a familiar point in an important new way: the vast majority of Sunnis were not kept away by the threats of violence issued from jihadists in the Abu Musab al-Zarqawi camp. Instead, they boycotted the elections as part of an organic protest organized largely through the mosques in Sunni communities. This point is not so much argued in a formal sense; it rises out of pointed vignettes such as this one:

Driving through deserted Arab slums, I could find no evidence of the election. No posters, no banners, no prominent voting locations bustling with people. When I finally found several men in the street, they could not point me in the direction of a voting location; they did not know where any would be found. (p 224)

Rosen's careful distinction between the jihadist terrorists associated with Zarqawi and the nationalist resistance that focuses its attention on expelling the Americans is far less familiar, at least to those of us who get our information from the US media. Here again, the story is in the details: determination to attack the Shi'ites in Iraq (despite the hesitations of Osama bin Laden), the opposition of Sunni resistance leaders to this strategy, the focus of the guerrillas on "robbing trucks delivering supplies to the Americans" and demands by local Sunnis in Fallujah for Zarqawi fighters to leave their neighborhood "so the Americans would not destroy it". And from this we get a beautiful sense of the ongoing tensions within Sunni Iraq about how to fight the occupation.

Rosen's approach, which combines with his graceful prose to make most points vividly and persuasively, limits him in some of his more ambitious goals. One overarching theme of the book is the gathering momentum Rosen feels will carry Iraqi society into civil war. While the text is full of vivid examples of sectarian anger, violence and mayhem, it is also full of images (such as those I have just mentioned), which suggest other currents and tendencies. Rosen's atmospheric style does not permit a sifting of these dynamics into a coherent argument for his viewpoint, and we are left with "the blues" about the future, but not a sharp sense of which currents will prevail.

But this is a small price to pay for the virtues of Rosen's method, one that is certainly suited to most of his goals, including his most pervasive and convincing theme that "two and a half years after the invasion ... the Americans were detested to different degrees by nearly everyone". (p 232) This verity is presented most persuasively through a dense description of the early fighting in Anbar province (destined to become the epicenter of the war), where we witness for ourselves that the hatred against the Americans there was hard-earned through a process of callous brutality.

At one point Rosen triangulates the contrasting realities experienced by American commanders, by enlisted personnel in the occupation, and by the residents of Anbar cities and towns. We read about Lieutenant-Colonel Gregg Reilly, the man in charge, saying: "When we go search houses, we're very polite ... We knock on their door ... They ask us in. They wouldn't appreciate us if we treated them like criminals." (p 76)

But then we read about his subordinate, a Captain Alfieri, saying, "I wonder how I would feel if someone was breaking down my door ..." (p 78) And, even closer to the ground, a sergeant "who quipped that after such treatment the ones who were not guilty 'will be guilty next time'." (p 82) And finally a local resident commenting: "Until now we have not seen anything good, only killing, searches and curfews ... It has never been so bad ... There is a reaction for every action ... If you are choking me, I will also choke you." (p84)

These sorts of descriptions cannot be found anywhere in the English language and maybe not anywhere at all. They are one of the few treasures that have emerged from this war, offered to us by a reporter of consummate skill and courage. -- Reviewed by Michael Schwartz