Dreaming of Baghdad

In the 1970s, a group of activists united by the dream of a better Iraq, organised in opposition to the Ba’ath Party and its charismatic leader, Saddam Hussein. Haifa Zangana was among the resisters who were captured, imprisoned and tortured in Abu Ghraib.

During her first years of exile, Zangana writes about the heady days of her activist youth, confinement in Iraqi prisons, and a forced departure from family and country. As she reckons with the past, she recovers vivid memories of life in a place she can never return to, a place that now no longer exists.