For several years, a trip to Zarqa was an obligatory part of the circuit for reporters covering the Iraq beat. The attraction was to understand the motivations of the town's most infamous export, Musab al-Zarqawi - the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in 2006 - as well as gain a window into the world of Islamic extremism in Jordan, a country known for its urbane face and pro-Western stance.

I first went to Zarqa in 2004, half expecting to find the grinding poverty and failed government of Afghanistan. The truth was somewhat blander. Zarqa is a town of 250,000 people, 18 miles to the northeast of Amman, Jordan's capital, but couldn't be more different. Instead of the ritzy five star hotels and restaurants of Amman, Zarqa had crumbling concrete apartment blocks and military barracks. Additionally, the city boasted a 30 percent unemployment rate and a burgeoning young population that survives on state handouts and the same sort of Islamic charity I showed you last week. Zarqa, in short, is quite typical of a host of towns and cities across the Middle East - neither too desperate, nor offering much hope - and seeming to trap its residents in the limbo world of unrealized aspirations.

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Over the past five years Amman, the capital city of Jordan, has seen a rate of development unrivaled in the Middle East except in the Gulf. It's not just the office blocks and fancy new housing developments that mark this change, but the arrival of a certain bling culture, which can been seen in the posters of semi-clad models inside shopping malls, and the traffic jams of new SUVs and sports cars trying to park outside.

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If the world could vote in the U.S. presidential elections, you might imagine that most would choose Barack Obama. After all, world opinion of America is at a 30-year low, and Obama is the candidate who embodies the deepest change in U.S. politics.

But according to a recent survey, the answer in the Middle East is closer to “None of the above.”

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The Institute for War and Peace Reporting is one of those rare phenomena in the development world: an NGO that trains young men and women in post-conflict zones to use journalism to question and critique their emerging societies. Their courage and commitment is clear from the record number of journalists killed last year – 95 – primarily in the areas where IWPR operates.

Today’s guest post is from Jean MacKenzie, Program Director for IWPR in Afghanistan, who writes about the plight of Sayed Parwez Kambaksh, a young journalist sentenced to death for downloading a feminist criticism of the Koran from the internet – and of the religious and cultural bigotry young journalists face in the new, U.S.-backed Afghanistan.

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