- Muqtada Al-Sadr
Muqtada al-Sadr is the fourth son of a famous Iraqi Shi‘a cleric, the late Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr. He is also the son-in-law of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir As-Sadr. While he does not hold any official title in the Iraqi government, he is one of the most influential religious and political figures in the country.
- Patrick Cockburn
Patrick Cockburn (pronounced) (born March 5, 1950) is an Irish journalist who has been a Middle East correspondent since 1979 for the "Financial Times" and the "Independent ". Among the most experienced commentators on Iraq, he was one of the few journalists to remain in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. He is based in [Iraq] as a correspondent for the "Independent", and has been filing reports on the war in Iraq.
- Al-Mahdi
Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi, was the third Abbasid Caliph. He succeeded his father, al-Mansur. Al-Mahdi, whose name means "Rightly-guided" or "Redeemer", was proclaimed caliph when his father was on his deathbed. His peaceful reign continued the policies of his predecessors. Rapprochement with the Shi'ite Muslims in the Caliphate occurred under al-Mahdi's reign. The powerful Barmakid family, which had advised the Caliphs since the days of al-'Abbas as viziers, …
- Richard Engel
Richard Engel is NBC News' Middle East correspondent and Beirut Bureau chief. Prior to joining NBC News in May 2003, he covered the start of the 2003 war in Iraq from Baghdad for ABC News as a freelance journalist. He speaks and reads fluent Arabic and is also fluent in Italian and Spanish. Engel wrote the book "A Fist in the Hornet's Nest", published in 2004, about his experience covering the Iraq war from Baghdad. A winner of the Edward R. Murrow award, …
- Michael Ware
Michael Ware is an Australian journalist reporting for CNN as an international correspondent based in Baghdad. He joined CNN in May 2006, after five years with sister-publication Time Magazine. He is one of the only mainstream reporters to have lived in Baghdad near-continuously since before the American invasion and he gained early acclaim as one of the few reporters to establish contacts with the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Iraqi insurgency.
- Salam Pax
Salam Pax is a pseudonymous blogger from Iraq whose site "Where is Raed?" (see external links) received notable media attention during (and after) the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The pseudonym itself consists of the two words meaning "peace": Arabic "Salām" and Latin "Pāx". Within his blog, Salam discusses the war, his friends, disappearances of people under the government of Saddam Hussein, and his work as a translator for journalist Peter Maass.
- Mark Kimmitt
Mark T. Kimmitt (born 21 June 1954), formerly a Brigadier General in the US Army, is currently serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East. Previously, Kimmitt served as Deputy Director for Strategy and Plans for the United States Central Command, and Deputy Director for Operations/Chief Military Spokesman for Coalition Forces in Iraq, and served at NATO's SHAPE headquarters in Belgium.
- April Fool
"April Fool" is the codename for the spy and double agent who allegedly played a key role in the downfall of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. According to General Tommy Franks, the commander of the U.S. military in the 2003 Iraq war, "April Fool", an American officer, was approached by an Iraqi intelligence agent working undercover as a diplomat. "April Fool" then sold to the Iraqi false "top secret" invasion plans provided by Franks' team.
- Lakhdar Brahimi
Lakhdar Brahimi (born January 1, 1934 in Algeria) was a veteran United Nations envoy and advisor. He retired from his duties at the end of 2005. Brahimi is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, the first global initiative to focus specificially on the link between exclusion, poverty and law. He was the United Nations special representative for Afghanistan and Iraq. Before his appointment in 2001 by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, …
- Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an American journalist. He is currently assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1994. Originally from the San Francisco Bay area, he holds a degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily. At The Post, he has served as bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo, and Southeast Asia, and as a correspondent covering the war in Afghanistan.
- Adnan Al-Dulaimi
Adnan al-Dulaimi is an Sunni Iraqi politician and the leader of the General Council for the People of Iraq, a component of the Iraqi Accord Front which won 44 seats in the December 2005 general election. In April 2007 it was reported that the Supreme Judicial Council had requested that the Concil of Representatives lift his parliamentary immunity so he could be prosecuted for supporting Iraqi insurgents and deporting Shiites from west Baghdad.
- Lynndie England
Lynndie Rana England is a United States Army reservist who served in the 372nd Military Police Company. She was one of several soldiers convicted by the Army courts-martial in connection with the torture and prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad during the occupation of Iraq. England held the rank of specialist while serving in Iraq. Along with other soldiers, she was found guilty of inflicting sexual, physical and psychological abuse on Iraqi prisoners of war.
- Samantha Power
Samantha Power 's 'A Problem from Hell' is a broad attempt to document the major acts of genocide/human rights violations of the 20th century paired with the international community's subsequent negligence in each case. She reports on the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and especially her major areas of research- Rwanda and Serbia.
- James Glanz
James Glanz is an American journalist who was recently named to be the next Baghdad bureau chief of "The New York Times". Glanz joined the Times in 1999. Articles he wrote with Eric Lipton and others on the World Trade Center were chosen as a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism in 2002. Articles Lipton and Glanz wrote were also a part of the Nation Challenged package that won a Pulitzer for Public Service in 2002.
- Al-Kindi
"' (c. 801-873 CE), also known by the Latinized version of his name Alkindus"' to the West, was a Muslim Arab scientist, philosopher, mathematician, physician, astronomer and musician. Al-Kindi was the first of the Muslim peripatetic philosophers, and is well known for his efforts to introduce Greek philosophy to the Arab world. Al-Kindi was a descendant of the Kinda tribe. He was born and educated in Kufa, before going to pursue further studies in Baghdad.
- Tom Fox
Thomas William Fox (1951 - 2006) was an American Quaker peace activist, affiliated with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in Iraq. He was kidnapped on November 26 2005 in Baghdad along with three other CPT activists, leading to a widely publicized hostage crisis. His body was found on March 9 2006.
- Kanan Makiya
Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi-American academic. He is the Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. Although he was born in Baghdad, he left Iraq to study architecture at M.I.T., later joining Makiya Associates to design and build projects in the Middle East.
- Jake Tapper
Jake Tapper (born March 12, 1969) is a journalist working for ABC News in Washington, DC. Born in New York City, he was raised in Philadelphia. For high school, he attended Akiba Hebrew Academy. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1991 with a B.A. in history modified by visual studies. He briefly attended graduate school at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.
- Adnan Pachachi
Adnan Pachachi (born on May 14, 1923 in Baghdad), is an Iraqi politician. Pachachi is the scion of a Sunni Arab family with a long tradition in Iraqi politics and a graduate from Victoria College, Alexandria in Egypt. He was Iraq's permanent representative to the United Nations in 1959-65 and 1967-68, and as foreign minister during the regime of presidents Abdul Salam Arif and Abdul Rahman Arif in 1965-67.
- Bernard Shaw
Bernard Shaw (born May 22, 1940 in Chicago, Illinois) was a leading news anchor for CNN from 1980 to his retirement in 2001. He attended the University of Illinois at Chicago from 1963 to 1968. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps. Shaw is widely remembered for the question he posed to Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Michael Dukakis at his second Presidential debate with George H. W. Bush during the 1988 election, which Shaw was moderating.
- Uday Hussein
Dr. Uday Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti (June 18, 1964 Baghdad - July 22, 2003 Mosul), was the eldest son of Saddam Hussein and his first wife, Sajida Talfah. He was for several years seen as the heir apparent of his father. He produced the newspaper "Babel" as well as the youth radio station Voice of Iraq (which ran American pop songs).
- Al-Mansur
Abu Ja'far Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Mansur was the second Abbasid Caliph. He was born at al-Humaymah, the home of the 'Abbasid family after their emigration from the Hejaz in 687–688. His father, Muhammad, was a great-grandson of 'Abbas; his mother was a Berber woman. He reigned from 754 until 775. In 762 he founded as new imperial residence and palace city Madinat as-Salam, which became the core of the Imperial capital Baghdad.
- John F. Burns
John F. Burns (born October 4, 1944) is an American journalist, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. He gives international reporting for The New York Times and frequently appears on PBS. Born in Nottingham, England, his family emigrated to Canada when he was young where he later studied at McGill University. In the early 1970s, Burns wrote for the Canadian (Toronto-based) newspaper "Globe and Mail", covering both local stories and later serving as a China correspondent.
- Jane Arraf
Jane Arraf studied journalism in Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. One of her first jobs was working for Reuters. In 1984, she was a bureau chief in Montreal. Then she moved on to a desk editor in New York City in 1987. In 1990, she went to Jordan to be the Amman bureau chief before returning to her desk-editing job in New York City and later in Washington, D.C. Her last job in Reuters was as a correspondent in RFTV (Reuters Financial Television).
- Al-Hadi
Abu Abdullah Musa ibn Mahdi al-Hadi was an Abbasid caliph who succeeded his father Al-Mahdi and ruled from 785 until his death in 786. Al-Hadi was the eldest son of Al-Mahdi and like his father he was very open to the people of his empire and allowed commoners to visit him in the palace at Baghdad to address him. As such, he was considered an enlightened ruler, and continued the progressive moves of his Abbasid predecessors.
- Marla Ruzicka
Marla Ruzicka (December 31 1976 - April 16, 2005) was an activist-turned-aid worker. She developed a unique approach to advocacy for civilian victims of war: she insisted that combatant governments had a legal and moral responsibility to compensate the families of civilians killed or injured in military conflicts. She and her Iraqi translator, Faiz Ali Salim, were killed by a suicide car bombing on Airport Road in Baghdad on April 16, 2005.
- Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani
Mahmoud Dawud al-Mashhadani is an Iraqi politician and the former Speaker of the Iraqi Council of Representatives. He was elected to the Council of Representatives as part of the Sunni Arab-led Iraqi Accord Front list. He was nominated to the speakership by the IAF after the main coalition in the Council of Representatives, the United Iraqi Alliance, objected to the nomination of Tariq Al-Hashimi. He was nominated as part of a deal on government posts between the IAF, …
- Anne Garrels
Anne Garrels is a roving foreign correspondent for NPR's foreign desk. She earned international recognition in 2003 by being one of 16 U.S. journalists to remain in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Her vivid, around-the-clock reports from the city under siege gave listeners remarkable insight into the impact of the war on Baghdad and those left in the city.
- Charles Graner
Charles A. Graner, Jr., (born 1968) is a former U.S. Army reservist and one of several soldiers charged by the Army in connection with the 2003-2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal during the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Graner, with other soldiers, is accused of allowing and inflicting sexual, physical, and psychological abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war in Abu Ghraib, a notorious prison in Baghdad. Graner has been accused of being a torturer, sadist, …
- Kimberly Dozier
Kimberly Dozier (born July 6, 1966 in Honolulu, Hawaii, United States) is a reporter and correspondent for CBS News, who holds both American and British citizenship. She was stationed in Baghdad as the chief reporter in Iraq for CBS News for nearly three years prior to being critically wounded on May 29, 2006.
- Kenneth Bigley
Kenneth John Bigley (1942 - October 7, 2004), was a civil engineer from Liverpool, England, who was kidnapped in the al-Mansour district of Baghdad, Iraq on September 16, 2004, along with Jack Hensley and Eugene Armstrong, both U.S. citizens. The three men were civil engineers working for Gulf Supplies and Commercial Services, a company working on reconstruction projects in Iraq.
- Chris Allbritton
Chris Allbritton is a web blogger and journalist, best known for starting the Web log Back to Iraq during the 2003 Iraq War. After he raised $15,000 from his readers, he became the Web's "first fully reader-funded journalist-blogger." After a second round of fundraising, he returned to Baghdad in May 2004 and contracted with "Time magazine" as a correspondent for Iraq until March 2006.
- John Lott
John R. Lott Jr., Ph.D. (born May 8 1958) is a Dean's Visiting Professor at SUNY Binghamton and has held research positions at numerous institutions, including the University of Chicago, Yale University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Enterprise Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA, and his research interests include econometrics, law and economics, public choice theory, industrial organization, public finance, …
- Al-Amin
Muhammad ibn Harun al-Amin, Abbasid Caliph. He succeeded his father, Harun al-Rashid in 809 and ruled until he was killed in 813. Harun al-Rashid had decided the succession to his sons during a pilgrimage to Mecca. Al-Amin, would receive the Caliphate and al-Ma'mun would become governor of Khurasan in eastern Iran and would furthermore be granted almost complete autonomy.
- Al-Qadir
Al-Qadir was the Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad from 991 to 1031. Grandson of al-Muqtadir, he was chosen in place of the deposed Caliph, at-Ta'i, his cousin. Banished from the Capital earlier, he was now recalled and appointed to the office he had long desired. He held the Caliphate for 40 years. It was during his Caliphate that Mahmud of Ghaznavid arose, threatening the West; and but for the conflicts that broke out in Mahmud's family upon his death, the Buwayhid kingdom, …
- Enzo Baldoni
Enzo G. Baldoni was an Italian journalist working freelance and for the Italian news magazine "Diario". He was kidnapped near Najaf, Iraq, on August 21 2004, by the "Islamic Army in Iraq," a Muslim fundamentalist terrorist organization, allegedly linked with Al-Qaeda. The Islamic Army released a videotape, aired on August 24 by Al Jazeera, in which it requested the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq in 48 hours.
- Darrell Anderson
US Army Specialist Darrell Anderson (b. Lexington, Kentucky, 1982) is a United States Army deserter and anti-Iraq war activist. Anderson joined the U.S. Army in January 2003 to get money for college and to serve his country. He later served in Iraq with the US Army's 1st Armored Division. He was awarded a Purple Heart after being injured by shrapnel in a roadside bombing in April 2004.
- Jamie Tarabay
Jamie Tarabay, 32, is a journalist born in Australia. She has a B.A. in Government and French from the University of Sydney, is fluent in French and Arabic and has spent the past 7 years as a foreign correspondent. She lived in Beirut for three years as a child and has spent much time as a journalist covering and living in the Middle East.
- Alon Ben-Meir
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir (born 1937) is a professor of international relations and Middle Eastern Studies at The New School and at New York University and is the Middle East Project Director at the World Policy Institute. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Ben-Meir has resided in the United States since the late 1960s. He earned his master's degree in philosophy and doctorate in international relations from Oxford University.
- Kim Sun-Il
Kim Sun-il (September 13, 1970 - c. June 22, 2004) was a South Korean translator working in Iraq for Gana General Trading Company, a South Korean company under contract to the United States military. Kim was fluent in Arabic, holding a graduate degree in that language from Seoul's Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in February 2003. He also had degrees in English and theology, and had hoped to become a Christian missionary in the Middle East.