Extract: This book provides a firsthand account of a nine-month period after the 2003 war which Mark Etherington – a former paratrooper in the British Army and a Cambridge graduate – spent in the Iraqi provincial capital of al-Kut, serving as head of the small Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The CPA team was charged with overseeing Wasit Province – a province with a predominantly Shia population of 900,000 and a long border with Iran – and begin the process of reconstruction, both political and physical...