Over the past year I have had an email exchange with the Iraqi journalist Jamal al-Ameady. The correspondence, that now has come to a close, had an old school delay feeling to it. Our emails had to be translated into Arab and English before being posted on the bi-lingual niqash.org site. The time shift didn’t matter much as the situation in Iraq continued to be catastrophic. We both tried to remain optimistic and discussed possible (media) strategies that would be helpful to get out of the hopeless situation. In the meanwhile Jamal escaped from Baghdad and became a refugee in Amman, Jordan. I didn’t know Jamal but found out that we had at least one common friend who worked in Amman for a while with Iraqi refugees. The dialogue was part of LIQA, an exchange of letters between artists, journalists and academics from Iraq and the rest of the world, produced by the Berlin cultural initiative Streamminister and sponsored by a German government agency. Niqash also has a radio network component.