When a brave journalist looks away: Iraq and Yvonne Ridley’s half‑seen map

No one familiar with the career of British journalist Yvonne Ridley doubts her courage for a moment. She is a woman who built her reputation in the field, not behind a desk; who crossed burning frontiers, confronted regimes, and paid personal and professional costs to bear witness to the oppressed. When she writes about governments that turn dissent into a prison cell, her words carry the weight of lived experience, not the comfort of distant analysis. Yet in her recent article, “The Cowards’ Playbook,” Ridley’s courage seemed to falter—not in conviction, but in scope. She saw Tunisia, Pakistan, and Syria. But she did not see Iraq. And that omission is not a minor oversight; it is an ethical gap unworthy […]