Kevin, I recommend you contact her (Riverbend) if you can -- I've exchanged emails with her and find her highly informed, intelligent and fairly balanced, as well as outspoken, in her opinions.

She has a wealth of stories to tell of the day to day life of women in Iraq -- her visit to her former workplace and they way she was treated due to the changing religious attitudes was chilling and heartbreaking at the same time. The search for a misssing neighbor, ultimately found in a roadside grave, where he'd wound up after trying to check on his elderly parents and confronting roadblock after roadblock still makes me angry -- the anguish of an ordinary family not knowing where their loved one was for days on end, searching roadside grave after roadside grave until someone recognized the burned out remnants of his car is an image that shall never leave me.

Try contacting her if you can -- she has a story to tell.