In scenes reminiscent of the street fighting during the civil war, Hezbollah men with machine guns battled government supporters on the streets of Beirut, snipers took positions, and neighborhoods were littered with burned cars and debris. The four days of ﬁghting left at least 29 people dead and 19 injured.

On May 10, I went with my colleague Raed Rafei, who was working for The Los Angeles Times, to cover the funeral of a young Sunni man who had been killed by a sniper two days before. The Sunni mourners believed that he had died at the hands of someone from their rival religious faction, the Shi ites. But the procession soon turned violent when mourners clashed with a Shiite man who refused to close his store that was located on the way to the cemetery. And when mourners smashed his windows with rocks and chairs, he responded by opening fire.

I immediately got down and crawled to take cover behind a garbage container. Raed also hid. When everything had gone quiet, I emerged from my hiding place and saw the two men who had been standing right next to me moments earlier lying on the ground in a pool of blood. Raed was standing over a body with a point-and- shoot camera. We had both survived and the two men had not. Their names were Ali Masri and Moussa Zouki. I still can’t shake off the memory of that day or how senseless their deaths were.

By the end of May 2008, I had had enough of Beirut. Like the toxic fumes of burning tires that constricted my lungs, the conﬂict had become psychologically suffocating. I decided to take a break and enrolled at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York City. When it was time for me to leave for graduate school, Anthony asked me to marry him and I said yes.

After graduating in June 2009, I moved to Baghdad to work as a reporter for The Washington Post. I was anxious about my new job, and about working with Anthony, who was widely considered the most successful foreign correspondent covering the Middle East. I fretted about the stories I would write and those I would miss and whether anyone would read anything I wrote at all. Anthony, now my husband, was the bureau chief. We had been married for a year but hadn’t lived in the same city yet. He was a great partner, in marriage and at work. Together, we brainstormed ideas, planned reporting trips, and sounded out the best translations of quotes from Arabic to English. On quiet evenings, we watched American television shows while eating pints of vanilla ice cream.

It was easy to sometimes forget that we were living in yet another country deep in turmoil.

In January 2010, three bombs exploded within minutes of one another in three separate neighborhoods in the city. The targets were hotels frequented by foreign correspondents and businessmen. The third blast was close enough to our house to shatter many of our windows.

It had struck the Hamra Hotel, which was across the street from the Washington Post building and home to many of our friends and colleagues. Anthony and I had left The Post in December and joined the New York Times bureau in Baghdad. I was seven months pregnant that day, and for the ﬁrst time in many years, I did not want to go to the bombing site. At that moment, I felt a bigger commitment to motherhood than to any news story.