The Flying Carpet to Baghdad

Zahra, aged 3, and Hawra, just a few months old were the only survivors of a missile strike in Baghdad in 2003. Their parents and their five siblings all died. Unable to have children herself, Hala Jaber, an award-winning foreign correspondent, was determined to do all she could to help them. Sent to Iraq by The Sunday Times to cover the war, the last thing she expected was to find herself trying to save two little girls who had lost everything. But what happened next tells us far more about that conflict than any news bulletin ever could. Being a Lebanese Muslim, as well as the employee of a London paper, Hala is in the privileged position of being able to straddle two very different worlds and explain one to the other, and her beautifully written and deeply moving account affords a genuinely fresh insight into the Iraq war and its terrible human cost. The praise for The Flying Carpet to Baghdad include: 'I read the book in one sitting and confess I cried more than once. Jaber's story doesn't tie it all up with a neat pink ribbon, but it is all the more telling and universal for that' — The Sunday Times. 'Nothing I have read compares to Hala Jaber's mesmerizing account of how her longing for a baby drew her into an intense, often agonizing, involvement with two little Iraqi sisters orphaned by a U.S missile strike' — The Daily Mail. 'Far from the usual gung-ho memoirs by war correspondents, this is a heart-rending and highly personal story by an incredibly brave woman' — Christina Lamb, author of The Africa House and The Sewing Circles of Herat.