it's the one year anniversary of signing my soul over to the devil

Anyway................... coming back to Baghdad these days is always difficult. It really is the equivalent of hearing your car tires deflate; a long pfffffffft that makes think: (oh fuck). A couple of months before it was very different, every time I came back I came with a sense of hope now this is gone because I know I am coming back to something that is worst than I left. I hate feeling this way because it makes me feel guilty; I used to love this place more than anything else. I used to feel like I belong. I lost that. These days I feel like I am drifting. So I come back every time hoping that I will find what I lost. An anchor. This time I am back in Baghdad for 5 weeks and I should be working on two short news films for BBC’s Newsnight program. I am still looking for a friend of mine with whom I am supposed to work together with him. He is a photographer for Getty Images and the Guardian. I am a bit worried about going to go out on the streets with a television camera on my own. But he seems to have disappeared, he goes on those crazy photo assignments and I assume that he is gone to the city of Najaf to spend time with the militant Shia groups and he usually turns off his phone. So as a result I am at home. I am actually too scared to go do it on my own.There was a mortar attack on the ministry of oil today. The ministry’s offices were partially evicted. Actually the ministry had no control, many of the people who work there decided that after seeing the images on al-Hurra channel yesterday they were better off staying at home. What al-Hurra showed was one of the strangest things I have seen for a while. They showed 5 Iraqis without any face cover setting up a mortar launcher and setting of three mortar rounds one after the other then got into a small bus and drove away leaving the camera man. The quality of the footage is not the usual jittery handycam images we see when they do their own Jihadi home videos and it was very professionally filmed. What was really worrying was that they never bothered to secure the tripod thing which supported the contraption. Every time they fired a round the launcher would jump into a direction other than the one it was originally pointed at. So it came as no surprise that the ministry was not hit but nobody wanted to take any chances and many of the people who work there decided to take the day off just in case. I spent my time at home reading [a short history of nearly everything] and listening to [Dogs die in hot cars]. Mindless fun to keep the bad bad world away.