Baghdad In the Past

This is a video of sights in old Baghdad. Most of what is seen here is long before the Saddam era.

Quest For Romance Ended In Murder

Reports of honor killings, if they are reported, tend to come out of Middle Eastern nations. Two stories of young women of Kurdish heritage who were murdered in their quest for Romance and love appeared in the news last year. One was the case of Banaz Mahmood who was murdered in Britain. The other was of a teenaged Kurdish Yazidi girl named Doa (May 2, 2007 post) or Du'a or Doa'a depending on how some bloggers spell her name. On the blog where this girl's name is spelled Du'a is the actual video of her slaughter which some brutish person video taped on their cell phone. I watched a portion of if it, but was too afraid to finish it. So if you choose to watch, watch with extreme caution.

The average American is not familiar with the term "honor killings" since we have a culture where generally women's minds and bodies are not controlled to the extent which the minds and bodies of women are controlled in some cultures. Such cultures in which women are treated this way are more feudal, patriarchial, and tribal based. Honor killing is when a woman, and occasionally a man, is killed by family members or associates of the family. The reason for the instigation of the killing is when a family's status or honor is blemished by the actions or perceived actions of the family member. In some Middle Eastern cultures family members will kill a girl or woman if they believe she has lost her virginity outside marriage, committed adultery, is raped, wants to divorce a husband even if he is abusive, decides to adopt a more liberal lifestyle or seek a better education, or who just refuses to obey the dictates of what the male members of her family want. Sometimes such murders are encouraged by females in a family when another female member refuses to enter an arranged marriage which is seen as advantageous to the family's well-being. Men who are homosexual or who are accused of being so are sometimes killed. Nevertheless, the case of honor killings of females receives more attention.

Concern about honor killings has become a big issue in Turkey in recent years, perhaps because of its' bid for membership in the European Union. Turkey also has a growing number of feminists who want to bring attention to the problem which occurs more often in the country's eastern and southeastern sectors, regions which are predominately Kurdish. In recent years, Turkey has witnessed cases which are honor suicides. If a person commits an honor killing in Turkey they can be sentenced to life in prison, so some people who want to engage in this blood sport have tried to cut corners, so to speak. Cases of young Kurdish girls who are seemingly the victims of suicide or accidents have occurred. There was the case of a woman who came up pregnant while her husband was away in the military, so her family told her that in order for the family's honor to be cleansed, she should just commit suicide since no male member wanted to spend the rest of his life in jail. Also in Turkey there was the case of a woman who spoke out on a talk show about abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband. When she returned to her home in the eastern part of the country, her adolescent son was pushed up to shoot her because she had stained the family's good name by going on television to speak publicly of her plight. In December Turkish Daily News ran an article Natural Born Killers (and Victims) about a Turkish female producer who is trying to shed light on the problem of honor killings in her country.

Often honor killings are seem in the west as a problem mainly against women in Muslim communities, but in some rural Christian areas of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, there have been some rare cases. In India, some families have killed women in rages because of dowries which they felt were insufficient. The first honor killing I ever read about was against a prince in The Bible and all the men in his city. Prince Shechem ravished Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, but fell in love with her in the process and wanted to marry her, but in an act of deception, one night Dinah's brothers raided Shechem's city in retaliation for their sister's honor and killed all of the men. In 1997, Anita Diamant's The Red Tent was a best seller about this Biblical incident. In the New Testament, Jesus showed his belief in the rights of women when he stopped the stoning of a woman supposedly caught in the act of adultery .

The stories of Banaz and Doa are issues of human rights and ignorance. Cases like this are common in rural areas or where people are too unenlighten to see that some cultural practices and traditions should be left to die in the past.

In Iraq where Doa was killed for her quest for love and Romance, last year these words once came from the former and late president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein 30 years ago:

The most important thing about marriage is that the man must not let the woman feel downtrodden simply because she is a woman and he is a man.
----Interview with the Al-Mar'a magazine in 1978.

A New Discovery, Sort Of...

When I was an undergraduate at The University of Georgia, I almost majored in anthropology. At the time my alma mater was seeking or claimed to be diligently seeking minorities especially African Americans to major in fields which did not usually attract blacks. Among my choice of electives I picked anthropology since then as now I was extremely interested in world cultures. The professor I studied under encouraged me to consider majoring in the field because I did so well in my studies, getting all A's. I evaded her urgings for reasons I will not go into here.

Around 2003 or 2004 when I was hunting online for any information I could find on Iraqi reactions to what was happening to their country, I found a site called Iraq4u.com which catered to Iraqis who no longer resided in Iraq. On the site were some Iraqi music by various singers, and because of my search there I fell in love with the music of Ilham al Madfai. I subsequently bought one of his CDs. But besides discovering al Madfai, I learned from the site that a people whom I thought had vanished in the pages of Biblical history still existed in Iraq. These people are the Assyrians, the fearsome warriors spoken of over and over in the Old Testament portion of The Bible. The ancient capital of the Assyrians was Nineveh, and even today in Iraq there is a province called Nineveh (Ninawa). There is very little left of what was once the ancient city of Nineveh, however, the descendents of these ancient people who had one of the first Middle Eastern high cultures live on, not as the worshippers of pagan gods like their ancestors millenia ago, but as Christian people. The Assyrians live dispersed throughout the world now. Assyrian minorities who still live in the regions which is their homeland are threatened by Arabization and Islamic extremism. About 400,000 live in the US.

The Assyrians are a Semitic people, whose native language is a form of Aramaic called called Neo-Aramaic or Syriac. Jesus is believed to have spoken Aramaic, so I am sure knowledge of this gives the Assyrian people a lot of pride. When I was Turkey in September, I watched a program on Al Jazeera English one afternoon, about a soccer team for the Assyrian community in Sweden. In this report, I heard for the first time about the Turkish genocide against the Assyrians who lived in eastern Turkey. I was well aware of stories of the Armenian Genocide, but here was a second group who apparently is not fighting as aggressively to get Turkey to admit to crimes as the Armenians are doing. At least I have not heard of any uproar coming from the Assyrian quarter to the degree it does from the Armenians.

What I am learning about the modern day Assyrian people is fascinating along with their music. One of their top singers who was born in Baghdad, but now lives in California is Linda George. She sings in Syriac (Neo-Aramaic) and English and has been inspired by such singers as Anita Baker and Barbara Streisand. Her official website can be accessed here.

The Assyrian people are very proud of their heritage and dream of being able to reclaim their homeland. They were after all the old kids on the block before the Babylons, Medes, Persians, Arabs, and Turks showed up in their territories. Nevertheless, the Assyrians are a mixed "race" of people. I personally think the ones I have viewed online resemble the Turkish people more than they do Arabs, Iranians, or Kurds.

It is said that Assyrian culture was around over 6,000 years ago. They had converted to Christianity before Islam existed. When I look at the products of Assyrian nationalism, it is a interesting mixture of their pagan and Christian heritage. These people are proud, ancient, and becoming a group which is a rare entity in the Middle East: they are Christians.

Here is a video by Linda George about Iraq.



A video by Assyrian singer Faris Esho with a lively couple dancing in traditional Assyrian costume.



A nationalist Assyrian video with (can you believe it?!) the rapper 50 Cent wearing a muscle shirt with the Assyrian flag on it. Is he Assyrian? :) Or does he even know that what he is wearing is the Assyrian flag? Perhaps an Assyrian fan gave it to him.




Here is another Assyrian nationalist video which has art referencing ancient Assyrian civilization.

Finally this video explains Assyrian traditional clothing

I really hope this ancient people can survive because the world will be less colorful without them.

My Wish For the New Year

I have a wish for the New Year that some way, somehow things will get better in this world. I am not very optimistic that it will, but still I hope.

Peace and hope seem to be ephemeral for so many. People look to groups and government to bring them peace, when so many fail to recognize that if each individual could seriously and without fear look at their own failures and remedy them, it would be a start towards a better existence. Each and every individual that is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong really need everyday to look at the man or woman in the mirror and ask what he or she can do to make this world a better place?

Making the world a better place is not about running away from challenges, being cowardly, being constantly critical and seeing everyone else's fault, not facing up to reality, or isolating. Some of the world's ills are the result of too few of us examing our hearts and finding out what is wrong there. This year what many of us need to do is make resolutions we can keep. This year the first place where every person can begin is to forgive all hurts and to ask for forgiveness. Just thinking I'm going to move on is not the way to go. The baggage from failed relationships and friends just accumulates and carries over to other relationships to only destroy them too in the long run.

Over the years my best friendships have been very fine in quality indeed because they all involved transparency, honesty, respect, and similar high principles. I only offer advise to my friends when they ask for it and vice versa.

It all begins with the individual. Start asking yourself each day, "How can I make someone else's day?" Not always, "How can someone make MY day?" Just a kind or delightful word, gesture, and look can go a long way in helping people. Listening helps too. No one cares much for a person who turns a conversation into a one dimensional exercise. Just listen sometimes. Tonight I just sat and listened at work to an woman who told me how she had to move to Georgia because she and husband lost their business and their home in Michigan. She is having to start over at 57. I hope my listening to her helped. I think it did. I was very happy to oblige by hearing her tale.

Last night I chatted with my best friend in Turkey just before New Year's here. We share each other's secrets and dreams, and I think it helps my friend just to have someone to listen who does not judge her. She thinks my off again on again Turkish boyfriend who lives in Turkey is being ridiculous in some of his overly emotional and Romantic comments he makes in e-mails to me, but she is like a sister to me and is free to say what she wants. I even joked with her that she can have him, even though I do care for him and is concerned about what might happen to him and his country. I have begged him to stop smoking, but he says he can't.

I do make the time to think about myself. I know when I need attention, and I know when it is time to focus on others. It is never fully about me. I hope it never becomes that way.

I had never met any Iraqis until last winter when I was Istanbul when I met a young woman name Waa'fa. Waa'fa and her family were the children of an Iraqi father and a Turkish mother. She was born in Baghdad. Before I meet her and her two brothers I had still felt very troubled about the plight of the people of Iraq. You don't have to physically meet a people to care about what happens to them. For the four years that the war in Iraq has raged, not a day has passed when my heart did not ache for that country. Some American citizens have long seemed to be only concerned about our troops, but the Iraqis are people too with hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I did not believe the surge would be big enough to help, but it seems now that perhaps it is working. I feel some happiness and hope for Iraq, a thing a year ago this time, I most certainly did not feel.

So I will end this rambling piece before midnight strikes and it is January 2nd with a very nice video of pre-war Iraq. Some of the refugees have started coming back. The walls between Sunni and Shiite communities which were erected by American forces are being brought down it is said. An Iraqi Romeo and Juliet who are "living happily ever after" now can be seen here.

Here too is my favorite video of Baghdad as it once was. The beautiful song in the video is sung by Hussein al Jasmi as in my previous post.



I wish all humankind a peaceful and a USEFUL 2008, and especially so for the people of Iraq.

Romance of the Despot

As you get older it seems that years just wisk by leaving you to wonder how a year seemed to drag on when one is a child or teenager, but once you pass 30 or 40 how it just seems without explanation to speed up. Well, one year ago one of the most blustering and dramatic of the world's strongmen was executed: Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti.

Saddam Hussein, "The Butcher of Baghdad," "The New Nasser," "Liberator of Palestine," "The Godfather," "The Anointed," "Great Uncle," along with other titles he probably reveled in and loathed, really had an amazing career which was Romantic by its' rise from the dirt and desolation of the Iraqi village of al-Ouja to "great" Arab lion and leader with over 30 palaces scattered throughout Iraq to the gallows of one of his former prisons. Saddam's story was definitely one of the poor boy who makes good, but his own pride and miscalculations along with the pride and miscalculations of others led to the suffering of millions of Iraqi innocents. There has been much written about Saddam, much of which is only rumor, speculation, and sensationalism. Feelings about him run from passionately for him to passionately against him. Just look at YouTube in the last year where there are more and more videos put on in honor of the man. The comments about him after these videos run the gamut from calling him a saint and martyr to a dog and bastard. Some think he is either in Heaven or Muslim Paradise and others think he is burning in Hell with his two sons Uday and Qusay who preceded him in death. Rarely is there a middle ground reached where Saddam is concerned.

Today in Tikrit which is basically Saddam's hometown (al-Ouja is where he was born and apparently in close proximity) he was honored with songs and chants by children, many of whom are so young they don't remember him. There were also fiery speeches. Saddam was loved and hated by many. When he was executed last year, demonstrations broke in of all places, India. India has the largest Muslim population of an country on earth even though the chief religion is Hinduism, but for some reason there was a lot of outrage there on December 30th last year. Some of it was certainly because Saddam was executed on the first day of

Eid, but Saddam has also been rumored to have given aid to India in the past. The reason why Indian demonstrated may have been because his personal physician is said to have been Indian. Saddam was also said to be generous to those whom he felt honored or liked him. Here is a photo of him back in the 1970s on a visit to India when he was vice president of Iraq.That is Indira Gandhi, the prime minister of India, beside him. Like her counterpart in Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, who died on Thursday, Indira met a tragic end. Bhutto's father who was president and prime minister was executed by hanging like Saddam. The real relationship between Saddam and the Indians is unknown to me. I do know that over the years, Saddam actively courted friendships with some countries in Africa. He was a friend of Castro and Qaddafi, and near the end of his rule was visited by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as this photo attests.

Saddam was a Romantic Despot and once the special glowing friend of the US in the region. At one point, before Iraq entered the war with Iran in 1980, Iraq was the most advanced nation of the region with a highly literate population, many of whom had university educations. Saddam, himself, always aspired to the best. He listed himself as both a lawyer and a general, but both titles were false. As a young man, Saddam allowed his penchant for politics to interfere with his quest to become an attorney. He tried to get into the military academy in Baghdad, but he was rejected. Being a tall man at 6'2" who at different periods of his life was strikingly handsome, he might have done his country a better service if he had become an actor. Saddam loved to dress up and would don the robes of the Bedouin chieftain, the general, or the look of the 1930s style gangster. He was a family man who loved to swim and play with his children, or at least he created this image for the public.His youngest daughter Hala was his favorite and was often seen with him even at political meetings when she was a little girl. She is reputed to have been a very sweet girl who loved Iraq and the Iraqi people, even stealing money and jewelry from her parents to hand out to poor people. Here is Saddam playing with Hala.

Here is Saddam sewing the sleeve on the dress of his eldest daughter Raghad, but it may possibly be Hala.


Here is Saddam and family in an old photo from the 1970s or 80s. The little girl beside him sucking her thumb is Hala.Saddam was said to have been married possibly 4 times. The photo above is with his first wife Sajida, who was also his cousin. She is the blonde lady. Saddam's and Sajida's marriage was arranged when he was only 3 years old. They met when he was about 10 and had run away from home to be with Sajida's family where he would be allowed to go to school, Sajida's father being a school teacher. Saddam's stepfather was totally against him receiving an education, beat and abused him, and felt Saddam should only aspire to be a farmer. Saddam obviously thought otherwise and hit the road to find his destiny.

Saddam Hussein saw himself as a Renaissance man, a throwback to leaders of old like Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin. Like Old King Neb, Saddam promoted colossal building programs for his country with many monuments to himself also thrown in. When he began modernizing his country while still vice president, he had electricity put in place throughout Iraq, plus he also made sure that every family received a television set and a refrigerator. More darkly, Saddam also got ideas from Joseph Stalin to whom he bore a slight physical resemblance. Saddam had the ancient city of Babylon reconstructed. He claimed to be a direct descendent of the prophet Muhammad. He was a patron of the arts with artists constantly using him in their subject matter as the "New Saladin" on a white horse leading Arab armies into victory or dressed in the garb of a Babylonian or Assyrian warrior in a chariot firing arrows. Saddam forged and forced a common identity on Iraq, a country pieced togther and created by the British. Out of Sunni, Shiites, Christians, Bedouins, Yazidis, Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Persians, Turkmen, Syriacs, Chaldeans, and even Jews Saddam demanded that they all see themselves as not just inheritors of an Arab state, but as descendants of the ancient empires of the Babylonians and Assyrians.

Saddam saw himself as a poet and also as a novelist, writing about 5 Romantic novels with political and allegorical themes. One of his first was Zabibah and the King. Even in his second and final imprisonment, Saddam was writing poetry.

Over the years we have heard mostly about the very bad Saddam Hussein, a man viewed by many as a brutal criminal, but don't we all have our faults, some of us with small and others with gargantuan. Saddam was a big promoter of the importance of education and pushed for women all across Iraq to be educated. All of his supposed wives were educated women. Under Saddam, the Christian community of Iraq was protected, but now they are threated and persecuted. One of Saddam's highest ranking officials was Tariq Aziz, a Catholic, who is still imprisoned by US forces. In the documentary Uncle Saddam, Saddam is shown as a man who saw himself as a father figure to his nation, encouraging people in the basics of just taking baths everyday in his regular TV announcements. When all hell broke loss in Iraq, some people lamented that perhaps Saddam knew what he was doing by keeping his foot on the necks of the Iraqis. He obviously was more well versed in Iraq than we Americans were.

Saddam's rise and fall were dramatic. When he was found in a hole in December 2003, he showed the world that the old adage, "the bigger they are the harder they fall" is very true. Saddam had gone from gangster to dishoveled Santa Claus. As my pastor said, "That was a SAD end."Saddam's destiny ran full circle in December 30, 2006. After the embarassment of being shown to the world as a poor old man pulled out of a hole and living in a two room filthy hut just across the river from one of his palaces, Saddam redeemed himself on the gallows. He died bravely and with dignity, praying the prayer which Muslims say before they die. The world's reactions were mixed. I was in Turkey at the time, and one of my colleagues who was Australian told another one of my American colleagues, "That was WRONG what the Americans did to Saddam Hussein. There is going to be hell to pay for this." Even the Vatican condemned the execution as morally wrong and said that modern nations do not engage in conduct such as hanging.
Though the world now does not seem to have the time or the common sense to learn and remember tough lessons, the life of Saddam Hussein is a lesson which many of us could benefit from by learning about.

To wrap this post up, here is a very well done tribute to Saddam Hussein. There are many on YouTube using Arabic songs, rap tunes by Tupac Shakur, and I even found one with a Hallelujah tune. The song in this video is sung by Hussein Al Jasmi.

A Poem By An Iraqi

I live in Georgia, and our state "Georgia On My Mind" was made famous by Ray Charles. For me, however, I could re-word the lyrics and make it "Iraq On My Mind" since that country has continuously been in my thoughts almost every day since the war started. Please bear with me if I tend to post here regularly something pertaining to Iraq, but this is my blog and like the old song said, "It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to." It's my blog... :)

Back in the spring while looking for a magazine on freelance writing at Borders Bookstore, I ran across the spring and summer edition of Atlanta Review magazine which is a periodical featuring contemporary poetry not only by Americans, but my poets in other countries. The edition I found was labeled in red "Iraq" and contained poems by Iraqis translated from the original Arabic. I am going to post here a poem by an Iraqi which is in the magazine.

The Heart of a Woman

The heart of a woman is the only country
That I can enter without a passport.
Where no policeman
Asks me for my card
Or searches my suitcase
Full of contraband joys
Forbidden poems
And delicious sorrows.
The heart of a woman is the only country
That does not heap up heavy weapons
Nor force its citizens to fight its wars.

By Lateef Helmet
translated by Soheil Najm

Love In the Time of the War on Terror

In the last four years despite everything the second war in Iraq has not stopped the innate need by the people there to seek love and Romance. Marriages are still conducted there regularly unlike here where marriage and Romance in some quarters have basically died. At the present time, the slaughter has slowed down perhaps because of the surge or maybe the desire for and enjoyment of killing has wound down somewhat. Let's hope that things continue to simmer down, and Iraq can right itself.

During the bloodiest phase of the war, I marvelled at stories of Iraqis trying to conduct their lives with as much normalcy as possible. Back in the spring, CNN presented a news story one afternoon about young Iraqi students at the University of Baghdad who spoke of their dreams of becoming professors, diplomats, or doctors even though the bombs were falling in the background, even though some of their professors, friends, and family had perished in the charnal house that Iraq had become. These young people who dressed so well and looked so cute and scrubbed, went to class each day unsure if they might be killed on their way to school or coming back. Some of them said they felt extreme worry for their homes and family whenever they heard bombs and mortars in the distance. What might they find when they arrived home?

I was aspired to become a blogger because of an Iraqi blogger whose pseudonym is Riverbend and whose blog Baghdad Burning has won awards and been published in two volumes which can be purchased on Amazon. This year Riverbend joined the mass of over 2 million Iraqi refugees who have fled to Syria and Jordan. She and her family now live in Syria. I have silently wept for the Iraqi people since the war began, and for the terrible injustice done to them. On my fourth excursion to Turkey, I was befriended by a young Iraqi woman and her family who were taking Turkish classes along with me. Their mother was Turkish and lived with them in Istanbul, but their Iraqi father was still in Baghdad. I have prayed for the innocents over there to be vindicated some how and that someday Riverbend and many others can come back to the country they love and miss so much.

Last summer I found a touching article on Time.com about an Iraqi couple who met and fell in love. Their love story is unusual in the tragedy of Iraq, a once great and proud country that over the centuries has repeatedly been eyed and invaded because of its' location and resources. This year, Iraqis have faced cholera, so for those looking for love or already in love, it has become love in the time of cholera too. But love is a very strong emotion. Where ever there is Romance, lets hope that the old adage can still apply that love conquers all. Read Romance, Baghdad Style .