aDncing in the No-Fly Zone, the first book by Vancouver journalist Hadani Ditmars, looks back from her last visit to Iraq in 2003 to her five previous visits beginning in November 1997. As a Lebanese-Canadian Muslim woman, Ditmars introduces a society bent but not broken by the continued hardships of the American-backed UN embargo, dictatorship, and two decades of war.

Over the course of the book Ditmars catches up in 2003 with the many artists, musicians, writers, actors, and ordinary Iraqis she had met on previous trips. Focusing on Baghdad and its environs, she tours the region, interviews American military personnel, NGO employees, religious leaders, returning expatriates, and the grandnephew of Iraq’s last king.

Iraq in the 1970s was one of the wealthiest nations in the Middle East. Today it is one of the poorest. Baghdad’s infrastructure, including its sewage and water filtration systems, has been destroyed, and unemployment is rampant, with many children working to support their families instead of attending school. The shift from police state to complete anarchy has left a political vacuum, with hundreds of political and religious factions jockeying for power. It has also left Iraqis facing an appalling amount of looting, carjacking, robbery, rape, abduction, and murder.

Dancing in the No-Fly Zone would have benefited from a brief timeline of key events and players, starting with Saddam Hussein’s rise to power until the present conflict, as Ditmars moves back and forth frequently in her narrative. This is a minor complaint. Ditmars’ narrative, combined with interviews and photographs of her subjects, makes for compelling reading, humanizing the events we read about in the newspaper and witness on CNN. She reveals the frightening reality of seeing middle-class life reduced to poverty and the daily terror of life in a war zone. Readers cannot help but come away from this book empathizing with the trials and suffering of the Iraqi people.