Riverbend's existence and identity remain a mystery, but the weblog entries suggest that she is a young Iraqi woman from a mixed Shia and Sunni family, living with her parents and brother in Baghdad.
She writes in an idiomatic English with, as James Ridgeway notes in the introduction to the Feminist Press edition of her work, "a slight American inflection".
On April 9, 2013, she updated her blog with a post "Ten Years On", in which she said she had moved on from Syria "before the heavy fighting, before it got ugly" and considered herself fortunate.
In 2005, Baghdad Burning won third place for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and in 2006 it was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.
BBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-episode dramatization of her blog, "Baghdad Burning", on the Woman's Hour serial, on each day from 18 to 22 December 2006.