Iraq

Riverbend's family has left the country.

"It was as if a million political bloggers sighed in relief and were silent."

Riverbend is leaving Iraq.

Unfortunately, exams are too close for me to blog elaborately, so I don't have much more to pass on than the link.

But it's a relief, in a way. At least now when there is silence at Baghdad Burning for several months, there will not be morbid speculations about car bombs, government-ordered "disappearances" and the like. Or, well, not as much as before.

After months of absence, during which the blogosphere was pretty much stirred into a frenzy of worry (Search Google, Google Blogs and Technorati for "Where is Riverbend" and you'll see what I mean), our favorite Iraqi blogger has finally returned to post.

She is unharmed and she hasn't left Iraq. She gave a "certain hopelessness" as a reason for not having blogged until now - that's understandable. I know many who feel that way about the Bush administration, and he didn't even invade the US. After a while, apathy takes over.

Her new post is about the Lancet study that concluded the Iraqi death toll was at 600,000.

That's six hundred, times a thousand. Picture a medium-sized city dropping dead in one moment. Americans - even the Americans on this side of the fence - keep moaning about the 2000-3000 troops that died in Iraq. It's like a division problem. Divide 600,000 by 2000, and see what you end up with. In that respect, the difference between the so-called "Bush league" and the "Pinko Terrorists" appears only to be that the left at least isn't proud that they managed to kill 300 Iraqis for every dead soldier.

Gah, I'm ranting again.

Well, head over to Baghdad Burning and go read. And, finally, exhale again.

She's all right.

Whew.

By the way, digg users should vote up this story so the good news can spread a bit more quickly.

Update 2006-10-19:
Look no further, friends:

There is Riverbend!
----------------------------

A bandwagon is quickly becoming apparent in the blogosphere: People are worrying about Riverbend.

These bandwagons, of course, are self-amplifying - the more people post about it, the more widely the worry spreads, leading to even more posts. So this amount of fear doesn't need to mean much. It could just be people scaring each other. Add this to the fact that Riverbend has frequently had blackouts of electricity and connectivity, leaving people waiting for weeks, and the whole situation is less bleak than it appears.

But I can't persuade myself of that. Even after the third or fourth time of posting "Where is Riverbend?" and then sighing in relief at the next post, the fears are immediately back.

Did she get kidnapped by the new religious brigades? Imprisoned by the Americans? Murdered? Even if nobody harmed her intentionally (and goodness, the world and especially that country is full of people who could and would love to do so if they found her) she could have been a bystander in one of the constant assassinations and bomb attacks. Or "friendly" fire at a checkpoint.

What she did and is hopefully still doing is amazing. She is risking her life and sanity to publish independent journalism in the most dangerous country to do so. People spit at her from all sites for their own agendas; she writes on.

As the result of a discussion on an online forum, I once got the following private message by someone in an apparent case of mistaken identity (he thought I was Riverbend... amusing).

hey fuck you ass hole. suck my american cock you douche bag. i hope you go to hell for making america look bad, faggot

This gave me an insight into the kind of things that actually reach their intended recipient (and, of course, into the intelligence of the average Bushist. But that's not new). And she never gave up blogging.

I just hope that nothing happened.

Long-time readers of the excellent blog Baghdad Burning by Riverbend will have noticed ages ago that their feed readers stopped working.

Why this? The last item displayed in the Atom feed is dated June 2005 - more than a year ago.

Unfortunately, this also means that readers are not alerted to new posts, which are usually weeks apart. In practice, this means either reading posts many days late or futilely checking a page all the time.

---

Along comes PHP, and a way to reverse-engineer a (reasonably well-structured) html page back into a database of posts, and from there to an RSS feed - the kind you can put into Bloglines, Google Reader or your favorite aggregator. The colloquial term for this is "scratching" as far as I know.

I've spent the last weeks experimenting with regular expressions on the Pied Piper archives, so it wasn't hard to parse the site. It was actually far harder to find a way to escape/remove the special unicode characters, html tags and other stuff that aggregators don't like. It validates now, however. I present:

The Baghdad Burning newsfeed,
brought to you by feeds.ermarian.net!