I'm Baghdad Deputy Bureau Chief for Agence France-Presse (AFP), the world's oldest and one of the biggest international news agencies.
I'm trying to get better at photography and multimedia, so have started a blog chronicling my efforts, and can also be found on Twitter.
Any opinions expressed here are my own.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I defy you to find a better skyline than Hong Kong at night.
UN envoy urges Iraqi bloc to ‘fight in parliament’
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq’s main Sunni-backed bloc should help resolve the country’s political crisis within parliament rather than stage a boycott, the UN’s envoy to Baghdad told AFP on Sunday.
Read the full story here.
The greatest threat at this point seems to be the permanent withdrawal of Iraqiya from parliamentary politics, which would mean derailment of the entire post-2003 attempt to establish democracy in Iraq.
Reidar Visser, analyst and editor of the Iraq-focused http://www.historiae.org/ website, telling me about the risks of Iraq’s current political standoff.
(Source: prashantsrao.com)
We think that there is energy in our people. We have to work to explode this energy. I do not mean, by exploding, to explode it like a car bomb.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in a speech in Baghdad’s Green Zone on January 1, 2012
(Source: khaleejtimes.com)
US soldiers at Al-Asad Air Base in Anbar, west Iraq, exchange goodbyes as they get ready to board buses that will carry them to a plane transporting them back home. (PHOTO: Prashant Rao; Date: November 1, 2011)
The US military completed its withdrawal from Iraq on December 18, 2011. In the weeks and months before that day, it organised several trips for the media to its various bases to capture the various facets of the pullout. Click through for a collection of images from some of those trips.
A soldier stands atop the Church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, in east Baghdad, as congregants attend Christmas mass.
The church was struck by a suicide car bomb on July 12, 2009, that left four people dead and 21 wounded.
On August 10, I went with a couple of colleagues to check out Iraqi men play a game of Mheibes during Ramadan in Adhamiyah.
Check out the multimedia essay I compiled from the trip.
Original iPhone Film Festival - Shortlist
Hi folks,
A film I made about Mheibes, a Ramadan game in Iraq, has been shortlisted for Grand Prize at the Original iPhone Film Festival.
I’d appreciate if you could click on the link, take a look, and ‘like’ the video to give me a shot.
Prashant
For those of you who recall “Pizza Hat” in west Baghdad, here’s another incident of blatant, and bizarre, copyright infringement. This one is from Karrada, central Baghdad.
(Photo: Prashant Rao using an iPhone 4)
Based on the terms of a 2008 security agreement signed by the United States and Iraq, all American forces must withdraw from the country by the end of this year. Though Iraqi politicians have said they will open negotiations with Washington on keeping a contingent of US army trainers beyond that date, no formal talks have yet been held and the 2008 agreement remains in force if no deal is agreed. A short radio piece by me on the logistical task of the US pullout was featured in the August 21, 2011 edition of RTE Radio 1′s World Report.
August 2010 was a busy month in Iraq. Along with US forces gearing up to declare anofficial end to combat operations, and get troop numbers below 50,000 (from a peak of around 170,000 during “the surge”), a suicide bomber blew himself up amid a crowd of army recruits on August 17, killing 59 and wounding more than 100. I filed a short radio piece for RTE Radio 1′s World Report programme at the time — check it out and let me know what you think.
It looks like the hunt for Gaddafi is off to a bad start.
My first foray into video, about mheibes, a traditional game in Iraq played during the evening throughout Ramadan.
This short video features Adhamiyah, a neighbourhood in north Baghdad, hosting nearby Saba Abkar.
(Source: prashantsrao.com)
American trucks ready to carry military equipment off Contingency Operating Base Speicher, on the outskirts of Tikrit, Iraq. (PHOTO: Prashant Rao)
