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 of her record.

Since 2003, Iraq has not merely become a failed state; it has become a vast prison wrapped in the illusion of democracy—an illusion engineered by the United States and handed over to Iran‑backed parties and militias. A prison that requires no show trials, because arrests rarely pass through the judiciary at all. In fact, the judiciary itself has become part of the machinery of disappearance rather than a guardian of justice.

Does Ridley know that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been forcibly disappeared, according to United Nations reports? Taken from streets, homes, and checkpoints—then vanished. No graves, no names, no trace. Their families........

© Middle East Monitor