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Iraq
ثوار تحت الإحتلال: الإنتفاضة العراقية 2011 [Revolutionaries Under Occupation: The Iraqi Uprising of 2011]
![[متظاهرون أمام نصب الحرية في ساحة التحرير. المصدر غير معروف]](/content_images/3/sm_baghdaddemo.jpg "[متظاهرون أمام نصب الحرية في ساحة التحرير. المصدر غير معروف]")
في تغطيتها للإحتجاجات في العراق، نشرت مجلة الإكونومست مقالاً تحت عنوان "حتى بلد تعم فيه الديمقراطية غير مصون من الإحتجاجات." والمقالة تصف العراق كبلد يتمتع بحكومة منتخبة، ومع ذلك فان التظاهرات تعمه بسبب فشل الحكومة في توفير الخدمات الأساسية. وتعكس هذه المقالة إتجاهاً عاماً في فهم الوضع العراقي في الصحافة السائدة. فالمظاهرات في العراق -إن تم تغطيتها أصلاً - تصور على إنها ضد إخفاقات الحكومة في توفير الكهرباء والأمن والخدمات فقط. وهذه الصورة تغفل حقائق جوهرية تتعلق بالعراق والإحتجاجات. فمن مطالب العراقيين الأساسية: إنسحاب القوات الإميركية الفوري من العراق وإسقاط نظام المحاصصة الطائفي. وهذا الإغفال ليس إعتباطياً أو سهواً. فعدم الإشارة الى ...
Keep Reading »Prospects for the Sectarian Terrain (Part I)
![[Image from France24]](/content_images/3/sm_saudi.jpg "[Image from France24]")
On 22 March, Sha‘lan Sharif wrote an article in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in al-Akhbar, the Arab world’s leading leftist newspaper. Sharif compared “the Jewish question” in pre holocaust Europe to the “Shiite question” of today. Jews were accused of conspiring against Europe, and against mankind throughout the ages, like rats carrying the plague, according to the Nazis. Just as Jews could not be trusted so too Shiites were accused of taqiyya, or dissimulation to conceal their “true intentions”. While Sharif’s analogy might sound extreme, he was correct in observing an increase of hatred of Shiites throughout the Sunni Arab world. While there ...
Keep Reading »Iraq and Its Tahrir Square
![[Government building in flames after protests in al-Qut. Image from al-Jazeera]](/content_images/3/sm_IraqDemos2.jpg "[Government building in flames after protests in al-Qut. Image from al-Jazeera]")
[This article is a slightly updated and edited translation of the original Arabic version that was posted on Jadaliyya and can be found here.] Iraq’s absence from the “Egypt Today, Tomorrow the World” map, published a week after the massive demonstration in Egypt on January 25th and which included the dates of planned demonstrations in different Arab capitals, was striking. The absence was not limited to the dates listed. Iraq as a country was not included. It is as if the absence of protests indicated the absence of the country itself. As if Iraq was not affected by the recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. This conspicuous absence is due to the nature of the present ...
Keep Reading »The American Granddaughter (A Review)
![[Cover of the English version of The American Granddaughter, image from Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation website]](/content_images/3/sm_AGD.gif "[Cover of the English version of The American Granddaughter, image from Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation website]")
Many Iraqis returned to their country after the American invasion in 2003 as members of the entourage that accompanied the invading army and helped it administer its occupation. Some of them were translators recruited by companies back in the US where they were living either as refugees, residents, or Iraqi-American citizens. Some bought into the “liberation” narrative and believed they were helping the old country get back on its feet. Others were simply in it for the six-figure salary. Zina, the protagonist of In`am Kachachi’s second novel, al-Hafida al-Amrikiyya (Dar al-Jadid, 2008), short listed for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF or “The Arabic ...
Keep Reading »Aftermath . . . America's Wars in the Middle East (Part 2)
![[A mural in A`dhamiyya's main square depicting many slain Awakening commanders, including Abu Omar, on the bottom right corner. Image by Andrew Henderson]](/content_images/3/sm_iraq10.jpg "[A mural in A`dhamiyya's main square depicting many slain Awakening commanders, including Abu Omar, on the bottom right corner. Image by Andrew Henderson]")
Over the years it seems like every time I visited Iraq I had to remove names of friends or contacts from my mobile phone because they were dead. Perhaps so death seemed as foretold as that of Abu Omar, an Awakening leader I met in Baghdad's Aadhamiya district in 2009. His predecessor (also called Abu Omar) was killed by a suicide bomber. When I first met Abu Omar he seemed confident and marched around like the local warlord that he was. In February of 2010 I had to meet him in hiding, his son sneaking me through an alley. When I returned in August of 2010 he was dead, shot by a sniper, replaced by a younger man called Abu Amna, whose life expectancy was sure to be ...
Keep Reading »Two Poems by Sargon Boulus
![[Sargon Boulus. Image from Samuel Shimon]](/content_images/3/sm_SargonBoulus2bysamuelshimon-1.JPG "[Sargon Boulus. Image from Samuel Shimon]")
Railroad The glass of the subway windows is foggy. Shapes escape across it, as if from a demon, and are sorted out behind us as “bygones.” The shrieking of the wheels on the rail. The appearance of the next station, at the bend of a tunnel full of wailing. A few vagabonds on the platform gulping alcohol from bottles hidden in paper bags. It is the same void rising from night’s end in any city overstuffed with the living and the dead: Paris, Berlin, London, New York. The end of the west. The end of the line. The end rail. A Pouch of Dirt Um Muhammad, the fortuneteller, the woman ...
Keep Reading »"The Corpse" by Sargon Boulus
![[Sargon Boulus. Image from Samuel Shimon]](/content_images/3/sm_SargonBoulus4bySamuelShimon-1.JPG "[Sargon Boulus. Image from Samuel Shimon]")
They tortured the corpse
until dawn broke down
and the rooster rose up in protest.
They thrust nails in its flesh.
They whipped it with electric cables.
They dangled it from the ceiling fan.
When the torturers were finally tired
and took a break,
the corpse moved its little finger,
opened its wounded eyes,
and muttered something.
Was it asking for water?
Did it perhaps ask for bread?
Was it cursing them or asking for more?
The Pomegranate Alone (Excerpt)
She was lying nude on her back on a marble bench in an open place with no walls or ceilings. There was no one around and nothing in sight except the sand, which reached all the way to the horizon where clouds crowded the sky and took turns blocking the sun before rushing to disappear. I was nude, barefoot and dumbfounded by everything I saw around me. I could feel the sand under my feet and a cool wind. I moved slowly to the bench to make sure it was she. When and why did she come back after all these years? Her long black hair was piled next to her head. A few of its locks covered her right cheek, as if guarding her face, which the years hadn’t changed at all. Her ...
Keep Reading »The Forgotten War
![[Iraqi Casualties. Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_casualities-iran-iraqwar.jpg "[Iraqi Casualties. Image from unknown archive]")
Selective amnesia is often deployed or manipulated to package history in a more simple and palatable narrative. The process involves major elisions to edit out any event(s) that might complicate the desired reductive and truncated narrative. One such major elision in the reigning Iraq narrative is that of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). That destructive war claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Iranians and predetermined the lives of millions of others. It impacted the societies of both countries in a visceral manner and many of its effects and repercussions can still be discerned today, yet it is rarely discussed beyond its name and a passing mention. ...
Keep Reading »An Open Invitation to An Occupation Masquerade
دعوة مفتوحة إلى حفلة احتلال تنكريّة نائب الرئيس الأمريكي جو بايدن في بغداد (ليشرف على مفاوضات تشكيل الحكومة العراقية التي قد تستغرق قرناً). ووزير الدفاع الأمريكي روبرت غيتس وصل هناك صباح اليوم في زيارة مفاجئة للمشاركة في الطقوي الاحتفالية. مساء أمس وجّه أوباما خطاباً إلى الشعب الأمريكي من مكتبه في البيت الأبيض وهو تقليد مهم في السياسة الأمريكية وهي المرة الثانية فقط التي يستخدم فيها أوباما هذا المنبر بالذات. والمناسبة هي “الاحتفال بانتهاء المهام القتالية في العراق.” والخطاب السياسي المستخدم لتسويق هذه المناسبة وتبعاتها يستدعي وقفة لتبيان ما يتم تسويقه وتعليبه بأغلفة جديدة ربما بهدف تغيير مدة صلاحيته وأبقائه على الرف السياسي ...
Keep Reading »Prospects for the Sectarian Terrain (Part II)
[Read Part I here.] On the afternoon of 17 March there was a government-supported demonstration in Baghdad's Karada neighborhood. About 100 demonstrators were provided with police escorts who closed the road on their behalf, unlike the police resistance protestors usually face in Iraq. Protestors carried banners stating they were from the “Khafija tribe, Beni Sa'd tribe and the people of Karada.” One banner stated: “The Beni Sa‘d tribe condmens the Saudi intervention that is killing our brothers ...
Keep Reading »Iraq Too?
Many cast doubts that the lung through which Tunisia breathed freedom could give birth to kindred lungs in Arab lands to the east or west. Even after Egypt shook the earth to dethrone its last Pharaoh, doubts were cast again as to the mobility of the phenomenon. Then came Libya, which is on the verge of casting away its dangerously delusional and brutal despot. Tunisia is everywhere. The spirit of the mythical bird, al-Bouazizi, hovers, together with those of other martyrs, in every Arab sky, from ...
Keep Reading »العراق وساحة تحريره [Iraq and Its Tahrir Square!]
[A slightly updated and edited English translation of this article is avaiable on Jadaliyya and can be found here.] كان لافتاً غياب العراق عن خريطة "اليوم مصر، غداً العالم"(١) (نشرت بعد اسبوع من مسيرة ٢٥ كانون الثاني (يناير)) والتي ضمت مواعيد المظاهرات في عدد من البلدان العربية. وهذا الغياب لم يقتصر على التأريخ وإنما على ذكر البلد كذلك. وكأن غياب الأحتجاجات كناية عن غياب البلد برمته، وكأن العراق غير معني بما يحصل في تونس ومصر على الأخص. ويعود هذا الغياب الصارخ الى طبيعة النظام السياسي في ...
Keep Reading »They Kill Christians (Too)
The attack on the Sayyidat al-Najat (Our Lady of Salvation) Church in the al-Karradah district in Baghdad on October 31st was not the first on churches in Iraq in recent years. However, it’s certainly the most lethal in terms of casualties, let alone its deleterious effects on Iraq’s already damaged social space. The Islamic State of Iraq, some of whose members stormed the church and took the congregation hostage and killed some of them before being attacked in turn by government troops, is now ...
Keep Reading »Aftermath . . . America's Wars in the Middle East (Part 1)
In my new book “Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World,” I look at sectarianism, civil war, occupation, resistance, terrorism and counterinsurgency from Iraq to Lebanon to Afghanistan. While half of the book looks at how the civil war in Iraq began and how it came to an end, other chapters look at the Taliban, the American military in Afghanistan and the Afghan police. The two chapters I am proudest of however deal with Lebanon, where I lived with my wife and son during ...
Keep Reading »Three Poems by Saadi Youssef
Fulfillment I used to, I often used to hope as autumn painted forests with gold walnut brown or muted crimson, I so hoped to see Iraq’s face in the morning to loosen water’s braids over me, to satisfy its mermaids with salty tears, to float over Abu l-Khaseeb’s rivulets to ask the trees: Do you, trees, know where my father’s grave is? . . . I often used to hope! Let it be . Let autumn finish its cycle. Iraq’s trees will remain naked. Iraq’s trees will remain high. Iraq’s ...
Keep Reading »Still at Sea: A Review of "Hope"
Hope, directed by Steve Thomas. Australia, 2007. In one of his late poems, the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus (1944-2007) wrote of “A million refugees clinging to his footsteps.” This was not poetic hyperbole. Boulus was haunted by a visceral tragedy. The invasion and occupation of Iraq back in 2003 and the sectarian civil war that followed displaced more than 4.5 million Iraqis and forced them to leave their homes. Around 2.5 million of them were internally displaced within Iraq. The rest were scattered in ...
Keep Reading »New Methods of Warfare Target Civilians--And it's Legal
The laws of war, or humanitarian law, are dynamic and read like a rich treatise on lessons learned-always commentary on the regulations of war that should have existed in order to avoid grotesque brutality. Consider that the International Committee of the Red Cross is the progeny of Henri Dunant's reflections on the lack of care for combatants in the Battle of Solferino, which he captured in his Souvenir de Solferino. The Hague Conventions of 1906 and 1907 came on the heels of Russo-Japanese War of ...
Keep Reading »Laugh! There is a Bomb in your Car
Ramadan is a very special time of year for Muslims and it is impossible to overestimate its socio-cultural importance. Additional time and effort are invested in its daily rituals and practices. Familial and social bonds are augmented and celebrated. Traditional games used to be an important facet of the month’s celebratory and festive mood culminating in the feast marking the month’s end. While these games are still popular and are still played in many parts of the Islamicate world, they have been ...
Keep Reading »To Stay Modern
On 4 August, after more than five million barrels of oil battered the Gulf of Mexico for over 100 days, BP proclaimed the success of its “static kill strategy.” Pumping the blown out well with mud and cement was working to stop what BP calls the “leak” or alternatively, “the Gulf of Mexico incident.” The company, its website explained, was “doing everything we can to make this right.” In the meantime, the environmental and economic devastation of the worst spill in US history and the world’s largest ...
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