Send in the clown

Jo Wilding's unembedded reports from Fallujah brought home the horror of the American assault on the city. But when she wasn't blogging, she was wearing stilts and trying to cheer up Iraq's traumatised children. She tells Emine Saner why she risked her life for total strangers

How to describe Jo Wilding? She's 32, a mother and a newly qualified barrister, who lives in Brighton with her partner. But she is also an activist, blogger, unembedded journalist, documentary star, human rights worker and a clown with a talent for making balloon animals. "Jo was the only one of us foreigners in Iraq who I was absolutely sure was doing something useful," says Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo. The journalist and film-maker John Pilger is another fan. "Living with families and without a flak jacket, she all but shamed the embedded army of reporters in her description of the atrocious American attack on an Iraqi city," he wrote last year. He said her dispatches from Iraq, posted on her blog, were "some of the most extraordinary I've read". The writer, director and academic Jonathan Holmes has written a new play, Fallujah, which draws heavily on Wilding's experiences, among others.

To read the full article from the Guardian, click on:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2081388,00.html