I've watched Baghdad descend into chaos. But it's the city where I feel most at home

I love Baghdad. It's the city where I feel most at home. I can't quite explain it, perhaps it's because it's the place whose people, whose story -- tragic as it is -- has had the most influence on who I am today.

I have a rolodex of memories, many of them fraught with the sort of pain that grips you by the throat. I'll never forget the piercing wail of a woman falling to the ground, her hijab tumbling off, her auburn hair spilling out, as she screamed with an agony the depths of which I had never heard. We were outside a hospital in Samarra in 2004; her brother was one of the dead inside, killed as the US military tried to take the city back from Sunni insurgents.