I was just visiting A Star From Mosul a few days ago, and was extremely angry that there were partisans who were filling her comments with posts about how the US forces were there killing tens of thousands of civilians wantonly, indiscriminate bombing, etc.

It just pissed me off to see folks dumping their political anger on this kid.

I'm a bit of a sceptic sometimes, but is it really possible to blog from Mosul? Is there regular electricity & net access to the point a young girl can blog regularly?

Also, there is a detectable inconsistancy in this person's use of English. Sometimes they use odd syntax forms and other times they write fluently. The odd syntax seems contrived to me, and not the natural misuse of words by someone who speaks English as a 2nd language.

There is more hoaxing going on in the internet than people seem to realize, and running a popular web-forum I've found that when something seems fishy it usually is- never underestimate the deviousness of people on the net. Since this 'girl' uses a blogger account instead of her own domain it's hard to actually trace her. Has she posted comments on anyone's blog? Can you see the IP and trace it to see if she's actually in Iraq?

I tend to not take things at face value on the net. Hell, 60% of the people claiming to be women are actually guys, its not a stretch to think this person is not who they claim to be. If things are so chaotic as this post claims I find it hard to believe this person is able to regularly run a webblog. I'd guess you'd actually be spending most of your time just staying alive.
-dw

Yes it is possible, and if you had read her blog for the last few months you'd realise that she is a real person.

There are so many little things in her writing that make it obvious that she lives in Mosul and is an Iraqi teenager.

Like what exactly? I read nothing there I couldn't mock up myself from news accounts and the blogs of servicemen who ARE actually over there.

Sorry I've just been witness to too many net hoaxes and I'm a bit cynical. It just doesn't add up that as bad as things supposedly are over there that a teenage girl would have either/or regular net access and the time and ability to maintain a regular blog. It just doesn't make sense. Plus the fact the writing style is quite suspect. Furthermore her 'pics' page contains no photos that are identifiably 'personal'. Any of them could have been gleaned from the net. Let's see her post her pic, plus a recent Iraqi daily paper, with a little note saying 'Hi docweasel and screw you' and I'll suspend disbelief. Until then, count me in with the agnostics.

I think you are all being taken for a ride and sometime in the future this person will out themselves or be outed and laugh at all of you. Question: has she asked for any cash from anyone to ease her suffering? Just wondering, not that it proves anything either way.

Oh, docweasel, so if she posts her picture and then someone rapes or kills her, will you accept the blame?
How about reading here about the need for "anonymous blogging" and the costs and dangers to those who do it!
http://invisiblog.com/info/faq/#3
Her existence does not depend on whether you, as some kind of arbiter, "believe".

wonderful sentiments from both the soldier and the teenager--and i shall give everyone the benefit of the doubt as to authenticity.

I am a war supporter and beleive in the rightness of what we are doing.

But....i have come to believe we have neither the willpower as a nation, nor the manpower as a military, to win the war.

by willpower, i mean that our political class (and its cousins in the MSM, Mainline churches and Academia)will not pursue the war to SYria and Iran, the two nations who are enabling the brutal insurrection. Nor will we talk seriously about Islam's role in all this.

Militarily, if we cannot hit ramadi and Fallujah simultaneously, then the question is moot.As we all recall physics, the water we don't immediatly sop up disperses. There are many, many cities and neighborhoods we dont control...adn do not have the ability to long-term garrison. without that, we are simply eliminating classes of jihadi. which is fine, but does not make for long-standing peace.

the bet here is that the next 600-800 USM combat deaths (6-7 months, I reckon) will buy the Iraqis enough time to simultaneously train real military and police, as well as digest the miracle of elections and representative government.

It is an expensive bet, but worth the odds.

I'm with Doc on this one, the pictures in the photo album are so non-descript, only pictures of an infant in the family pictures? And the flip flopping back and forth between mis-spelling and properly spelling "calm" strikes me as contrived. Even in this post the unreliability of the phone service is mentioned but yet blogging at dial up speeds seems to present no problem? Unfortunately some people get off on punking others.

So WHAT if it is a hoax? Who friggin cares? Is your ego that fragile that you would rather assume its all a scam rather than take a leap of faith and try and comfort another human being? Whats the worst that would happen? You would be fooled on the internet! Oh the horror. If she is who she claims, I suspect she would like to know that even those of us that support this war, care that innocent children and non-combative Iraqi's will survive this trying time.

The 'so what' is the credibility of bloggers. Truth is important and has a lot to do with whether or not 'she' is reporting accurately, or is not what she appears to be and has an agenda in her reporting. Who someone is tells you a lot about what their biases and slants to their reporting is. You sound like Dan Rather "So what if the memos are fake, the information is correct!!"

In law, proving someone a liar can debunk their entire testimony. If 'she' is not who she says she is, this entire blog may just be fantasy/propaganda while some of you are taking it as real news. As a blogger, I am on the lookout for scams that can paint ALL bloggers as fakes and charletans. ALready there is liberal accusations that the Republicans program certain blogs, that "Buckhead" was a Karl Rove plant, etc. Just an an anonymous source is less than credible, so is a hoaxed website, more so since 'she' claims to be a teenage girl instead of just saying "I'm an Iraqi, I don't want to say my gender or age for security reasons."

Sorry, I have a nose for these things and I've seen a lot of hoaxing and something just isn't kosher here. Admittedly more investigation of her writing needs to be done, but its quite a claim to be a teenage girl in the middle of a war-zone blogging, with relatives dying around you. It requires a bit more proof then saying you're a construction worker in Des Moines with time on his hands blogging his own opinions. I just don't buy it, it has all the earmarks of a hoax.

As to posting her pic, there are ways. "She" can stand in front of a recognizable landscape with a recent paper, obscuring her face and holding a little sign that says "Hi its me". If 'she' were that worried about her safety I doubt 'she' would be blogging at all, what is the point?

I get emails from the President of Nigeria's wife periodically, and I don't make a 'leap of faith' on those either.

I have to agree with the suspicion about her just this bit alone is odd

"(They brought his father home, and they're trying to wash him like the Muslims do to their dead before burying them), there were no enough cotton and they can't go out to buy some.
......

Till 5:30, my brother-in-law finally arrived! Thank God. "

"like *the* Muslims do...."?

"Thank God"?

she says that more than once in her posts

it all seems I bit much

What rang an alarm bell for me was the use of 'pidgin' type English. If you were a street vendor who was trying to sell things to Americans, you would learn a form of pidgin English, phrases and misused words, just enough to communicate, and you would use words and phrases conjoined in weird ways in order to communicate using your limited vocabulary and knowledge of syntax and grammar. This person purports to have learned English in a formal manner. Phrases like "a war of bullets" immediately set off bells in my head- this is someone trying to pretend to be a foreigner.

Here's the juice- many teenage girls have blogs/homepages throughout the world. There are several, not a huge number, of legit Iraqi bloggers (iraqthemodel.com is a good one) but run by adult men. So, without real insight or news to report, how to get my blog noticed? A scriptwriter would come up with an Iraqi Anne Frank, blogging between the bullets. Its a bit too pat for me. I'm interested now and I'm going to peruse her posts for more clues, but I'm willing to bet this is a hoax and not an actual Iraqi teenage girl. In fact, I'm willing to bet she's neither a girl or an Iraqi, and most likely not a teenager either.

When you have a really implausible situation like this, its incumbant upon the purpetrator to come up with some bona fides, not the other way around. This person is asking us to swallow a lot. Mudville most likely wouldn't even be linking this person if it weren't for the unique claims of provenance of the info. Its intriguing and interesting and just a bit too cute for reality. Other bloggers should check this out as well, and I'd like to hear from some legit native Arab speakers to weigh in with how her sentence structure compares with a real Arab writing English.

And what is your expertise in determining proper syntax for an Arab speaker to write in English? How many other Iraqi blogs have you read consistently? Do you think the age of the blogger might effect how and what is said as well as the strength of their religious belief?

Do you know their culture enough to determine what is a strange way of writing?

I've been reading this blog for a few months. It sure sounds like a real teenager to me, and one from a upper middle class background (thus the 'net access). She has bitched about her French teacher, posted photos of the crappy condition of the school yard, told the story about the panic of discovering she'd forgetten to turn in her test paper etc. Very little of this is political. Most of the war stuff has been tossed off almost casually.

I've read about her eagerness to get her Mom's castoff cell phone (mobile) and her plan to trade it in for a certain model she covets. Very teenaged self absorption. There was a post about the difference between life in Mosul and Baghdad. If this is all fake, fine. But for what purpose?

Between Dan Rather, who I can see with my two eyes, and Star -- I give her more credibility.

I'm with DW on this. There are plenty of blogs out there that are supposedly from Iraq and I think that the majority of them are US controlled disinformation. Which...is OK with me, btw, if it takes this kind disinformation or any type of propaganda or psychological warfare to win, then so be it.
Also, as you can tell by the poor writing of my post, it's difficult to tell much about the poster. I have undergrad and graduate degrees from prestigious universities and I still can't write a decent sentence...or spell.
Thank god my living doesn't depend on my writing ability.

I have to say that the blog is very suspicious. The average Iraqi does not read the Koran on a regular basis, nor does a 15 year old girl know all that much about her religion. I voted for Bush, so quit making him look bad you dumb ass.

yeah take a look at this one:
http://baghdadgirl.blogspot.com/
check out the Dollar bill rose picture. Im sure that an Iraqi girl finds that cool. Quit making bush look bad.

Boy, you guys are cynical.

I stopped reading girl from Mosul a while ago becuase it was TOO BORING AND TEENAGEISH. (word?)

I don't think our government could come up with that. It's pretty much useless as propaganda...we use ARABIC for that not English.

I think docweasel is the fraud. How much you wanna bet he's a hot buxom barely legal blonde pretending to be a middleaged geek male?

Being an American teaching English as a second language in China I can attest to the ability of non-native speakers to sometimes use almost perfect English and at other times to make simple mistakes. It can depend on the time they have to spend on writing, on how nervous they are as well as how well they can type.

I do not know if this girl is who she says she is but I choose to take her at her word. I read Nabil's Blog from the beginning. At first it was almost un-readable but he has made great progress and now it reads as well as my second year English majors.

I also have a dear friend who is Iraqi who teaches English in China. He is an electrical engineer. I think that some of you assume that Iraqis don't know any English, are poorly educated and are suspicious of anyone who writes well.

Sarmad at Road of the Nation does not write well but I have talked to him on the internet and he speaks extreemly well. Have you read Alaa at Messopatamian- essayist par excellence. Sam at Hammarobi makes lots of mistakes, especially when he is enraged but his humor always comes through. Riverbend writes extreemly well.

You just need to know more Iraqis personally. And perhaps travel more in the world. That would make it easier for you to accept Iraqis at face value.

I was reading astarfrommosul's blog long before I saw this post's comments questioning her authenticity.

Her sister (HNK)'s blog (iraqigirl.blogspot.com) shows the linguistic patterns of a mideast person less familiar with English (in those posts Najma did not help with). Also HNK's posts are occasionally in arabic.

DW and others may question her English skills and consistency but her sister sounds very much like the arabs I have met through my wife's job (professional arabic/persian dancer in Orlando).

If you wish to doubt Najma and HNK, ask an arab friend to translate and idiomatically authenticate the arabic on HNK's page. Since HNK and Najma cross-reference each other as sisters, either both are true or both are false.

As to the not-gonna-happen suggestion that Najma take a picture of herself, however masked etc, ... the suggestor does not live in her position, and forgets that she is intentionally masking herself behind an acknowledgedly false identity:

from Najma's "about me" page:
"My name is not Najma Abdullah, and I'm not going to tell you my real name, coz I don't want to get killed."

I have read through most iraqi-authored blogs I could find (posts and archives, not comments) about a week after GWB's re-election to get iraqis' opinions on said re-election. This is how I came upon astarfrommosul and the Jarrar family of bloggers (mom and three sons) who do have self-identifying pictures up and are also known outside of Iraq. (AFAICR, Mrs. Jarrar appeared in a letter-writing-series in SLATE, and one of the boys is studying in Canada.)

To the questioner who asked how bloggers can operate with intermittent electricity, the answer comes as the Jarrar's proudly show off their new generator that replaced the old one that died recently. Richer families in Iraq have generators, as do many in the third world who have intermittent electricity (I'm US-born but grew up in Trinidad, in the Caribbean). Many Iraqi bloggers referenced using internet-cafe arrangements, and it is not unreasonable to accept at face-value that many Iraqi bloggers say that part of their reason for blogging is to practice written English, especially now that US/UK/EU contact is considerably expanded since the fall of Saddam.

Responding to those who question why the sisters refer to God and not consistently to Allah, refer to http://theflowerofmosul.blogspot.com/2004/09/names-of-allah.html
... I think you'd see that Allah can be called many things and apparently the sisters translate to "God" when they write in English. They also use "PBUH" on a regular basis, which is not a westerern phrase by any standard.

Also, while I acknowledge that many in the anti-war crowd may be without-a-life and so forth, but does anyone really think a peacenik would be patient enough to create such a HUGE volume of writing as the sisters' two blogs contain, including that much in arabic? AND have so little of it war-related? while the sisters are clearly anti-fighting and anti-occupation, they are not AFAICR anti-american ... and they are definitely pro-democratic-Iraq and sounded optimistic in many parts. IMHO, no peacenik could sound so ... sane.

BTW: HNK in her about-me post in July 2004 says:
"I have great father, he is a doctor and agreat mother, she is an engineer. we live in mosul a city in the north of Iraq. My grandfather is a scientist and an enginreer proffessor"
I.E. their family is unusually well-off for Iraqis ... explaining how if any Iraqis could afford generators and computers, their family certainly could.

Doubters, please find something else to put your time into and to debate, such as the danger from ethnically-targetted bio-warfare contagious viruses that will be possible within 10-15 years due to the convergence of the human-genome-project, computational protein analysis, and gene-targetted cancer-killing-viruses research. Imagine if the US/UK/EU tried to embargo cancer research data from the medical research teams of the University of Damascus, Tehran or Baghdad ... impossible. Yet that cancer-research-data by around 2010 will be sufficient to create custom viruses to wipe out only colon-cancer cells ... or caucasian-male cells. Now cross that with the transmittability of the common cold. Nukes only kill low-millions, biowarfare would ethnically purge the entire planet. Future-warfare is the REAL reason we invaded ... the West cannot afford psychotic do-anything governments in the coming age of bioengineering.

Sorry, vented a bit there ... doubters, find someone else to doubt, like ANSWER, the UN, or the stated vs real reasons that FR, DE, RU and CN opposed GW2 (hint: black, liquid, found under iraq).

/\/\
\/\/

I think none of you are real! Well maybe the hot blonde law clerk posing as doc. But only him, er, her. I think mudville isn't real either and there isn't a mudville gazette. Is mudville still here when I shut down my computer? Hello... hello.... is anyone listening?

MAW,
Concur yr analysis.

We're living in a time of authenticity, truthfulness and fact-checking. Nevertheless, some among us take it too far, FAR TOO FAR, and it becomes like any other out-of-balance habit... a mind-numbing exercise without much redeeming value!

Concur yr analysis re the authenticity of the IraQEnglish exhibited at their blogs. It really sounds like my bi-lingual friends (Arabic-English) (Farsi-English) and not too far off for Thai-English and Korean-English.

But you're being (they bloggers are being attacked) by stay-at-home TALKERS, not DOERS like some of us who've taught Korean and speak Thai daily in business and personal life... as well as our native American English!

I am from a latin language (Portuguese) and when i am speed writing in english i just forget to properly use correct construction sentences. It's a sort of Portuglish.

I keep thinking of this quote from General Sherman whenever I read your site Greyhawk:

"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."

I have a nose for these things, and the blog is certainly genuine. That being settled, what will be the impact of the destruction of the tons of weaponry and explosives seized in Fallujah, and the deaths of the thousands of Sunni criminals there?
How many Sunni criminals will have to be killed to make Iraq safe?

I have no nose.

The thing is, they say it takes one to know one, and I've pulled a lot of 'net hoaxes myself. In fact, our site kind of made its bones hoaxing some really tasteless stuff after the WTC attack. Its not hard to do because people seem very credulous about stuff that you'd think they would require a tiny bit of evidence. I'm looking at all these 'rebuttals' and I've yet to see "well I talked to her on the phone as a matter of a fact, from Iraq" or "I'm the webmaster, she posted a comment and sure enough the IP was from an Iraqi internet hub" or the slightest tiny bit of evidence other than "I've been reading her blog for a long time."

You may be credulous and choose to believe a tall tale. The facts sound really hinky to me. They don't add up. The girl claims to be in the middle of a warzone, where we _know_ electricity and phone service are very intermittant and unreliable. People are struggling just to stay alive and supposedly getting shot all around this girl. It would seem to me it would be a daily struggle just to get food and clean water. Yet she's able to gaily blog about her new cell phone and other trivia mentioned here. If it smells like bullshit it usually is bullshit is my rule on people claiming to be someone or something far-fetched on the net. If she's in such danger if she posts her pic, why the hell is she even blogging? Are we supposed to believe noone in her circle of aquaintances knows she blogs? She's apparently on the computer morning noon and night.

The more you look at it the more insanely ridiculous it sounds. If you guys choose to believe this fairy tale more power too you, believing in that Santa Claus, Dear Abby and Elvis all blog helps some people get through the day as well. I require a bit more than someone's say-so.

I'm wondering when she's going to start asking for some donations to help her in her plight. That will be the kicker ;)

Rock on saps.