Syria: Iraqi artists, now refugees, struggle to pursue art in exile

My recent story for the Christian Science Monitor (with more coming):

• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.

DAMASCUS, SYRIA – To support his art in Baghdad, Alaa Ismael opened an interior-design office in a commercial area near his house. But after the American invasion, customers dwindled as checkpoints choked the city.

In 2004, his office was burned and robbed by extremists. “They killed everyone, not only artists,” he said. “Jihadis would threaten us, calling us ‘kafirs’ [unbelievers] because of our art, because of the style or subject of our work.” While he was never threatened personally, “threats were all around.”

So Mr. Ismael left with his wife, sister, and nephews for Syria, where he has been for the past five years. He quickly shakes his head when asked about going back. His oldest daughter was an infant when they left Iraq; his second daughter was born here this year.

They all share the same apartment in a ramshackle hillside neighborhood overlooking Damascus. One of its rooms is his studio, where large finished canvases and rolled-up paintings are stacked, unsold.

Ismael is one of dozens of Iraqi refugee artists here, struggling to paint and sell his work to support himself and his family and maintain a semblance of his former life in Baghdad.

“Before the war, Baghdad was the cultural and artistic center,” Ismael said. “There were galleries, art schools, universities. There was movement.”

For him, more opportunities in art exist abroad now – through friends and fellow artists in the Gulf and Europe – than in exile here in Syria.

Omar and Alaa are but two of the dozens of Iraqi artists in Damascus right now. Skilled painters, some abstract, some based in Islamic calligraphy and stylized Arabic text, they were a vital part of culture and society of pre-invasion Iraq and now have an equal place among the millions of Iraqi refugees in the region and across the globe. Read the rest here.

Filed under: Iraq, Syria, Writing , Iraqi artists, Christian Science Monitor

American-made death squads

Another side of the American remaking of Iraq, from the Nation:

As Hassan tells it, it was a quiet night on June 10, 2008, in Sadr City, Baghdad’s poor Shiite district of more than 2 million people, when the helicopter appeared over his house and the front door exploded, nearly burning his sleeping youngest son. Before Hassan knew it, he was on the ground, hands bound and a bag over his head, with eight men pointing rifles at him, locked and loaded.

At first he couldn’t tell whether the men were Iraqis or Americans. He says he identified himself as a police sergeant, offering his ID before they took his pistol and knocked him to the ground. The men didn’t move like any Iraqi forces he’d ever seen. They looked and spoke like his countrymen, but they were wearing American-style uniforms and carrying American weapons with night-vision scopes. They accused him of being a commander in the local militia, the Mahdi Army, before they dragged him off, telling his wife he was “finished.” But before they left, they identified themselves. “We are the Special Forces. The dirty brigade,” Hassan recalls them saying.

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army’s Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret’s dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.

More.

Filed under: America, Iraq, Media , Death Squads, Iraq Special Operations Forces, occupation, The Nation

Refugee Chess

A recent story of mine that ran on the newly launched Wunderkammer Magazine in New York.

They lived well in Baghdad; their eldest daughter had two cars. Six years later, the Iraqi couple moves their mattresses out of the bedroom each night to sleep on the living room floor. The only bedroom is left for their daughters while they live in this concrete refugee suburb of Damascus.

It was Friday and quiet on the balcony above the street. The fried fish lunch was over and the mother was reading fortunes in the bottom of coffee cups. The father skulked past the couch and flashed his pack of cigarettes. He didn’t smoke before the war. He was a chain-smoker by the time he arrived in Damascus. He shrugged when his wife explained his new habit—“he’s always with a cigarette, always, but he never smoked before.” She brought her index and middle finger to her mouth and mimed puff after puff.

Read the rest here.

Filed under: Iraq, Syria, Writing , chess, Damascus, Iraqi refugees, Wunderkammer

Shoes!

“This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is a farewell kiss, you dog! … This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”

There is a lot to say about these shoes, and the gusto of Muntazir Az-Zaydi. It’s a subject that will get play in the press for weeks now – I mean the Arabic press. Az-Zaydi is a celebrity now, a folk hero for online video and satellite news. American media will report ad nauseam in clear and simple English just how offensive shoe throwing is in “Arab or Muslim or Islamic culture.” They will try and delve into the cultural significance of all this, and only look more and more like out-of-touch asses oggling at the others for standing up and throwing something at Bush. The Angry Arab is having a field day — is there a better Eid present? or early Christmas gift? — and if you want to laugh and read all the compliled cultural analysis on the meaning of a shoe in the Middle East and see how it is properly lambasted, click there.

Seriously, let’s hope Az-Zaydi is released very soon.

From McClatchy:

It wasn’t clear whether Zaidi was hurt. His employer, Cairo-based Baghdadiyah Television, released a statement late Sunday demanding Zaidi’s release from Iraqi custody.

“Any action taken against Muntathar will remind us of the actions and behaviors taken by the reign of the dictator and the violence, the random arrests, the mass graves and confiscations of freedom from the people,” the board of Baghdadiyah said.

Friends said Zaidi covered the U.S. bombing of Baghdad’s Sadr City area earlier this year and had been “emotionally influenced” by the destruction he’d seen. They also said he’d been kidnapped in 2007 and held for three days by Shiite Muslim gunmen.

Filed under: Iraq, Media , Muntazir Az Zaydi, Shoes

A studio visit

We enter the artist’s apartment – let’s call him Khalid – and turn to the left into another room. There is florescent light at one side, to the right, where two painting hang on facing walls that frame the middle wall, which is the workspace. A plastic tarp hangs on the white wall, protecting it from splattered paint, aerosol spray and free strokes. The linoleum floor is not covered and has the shoe sole and color marks of a studio floor. A folding worktable is covered in paint cans and jars and dry brushes.

To the other side of the room, to the left upon entering, is the living room. The television in the corner is showing “First Knight” with Richard Gere and Sean Connery on mute, below more paintings: a pair of tall blue and red figure pieces – “these I don’t like much,” Khalid says – and a yellow and green scene of three thin figures over a bicycle.

A couch on the opposite wall faces the studio corner, flanked on the adjoining wall by two chairs. A place for tea – which he brings ten minutes after showing us the paintings and gushing at our visit.

“These two… are brother and sister” – he points to a pair of white and turquoise-banded paintings on the small wall, cut by the balcony, that faced the living room corner.

“Are they the marshes?” I ask, since they share tones of two of his other paintings, which he described a week before, triumphantly, as “marsh paintings: southern Iraq.”

“No, they are any village,” he replied. “They are the Iraqi villages, along the rivers, or the oases, in the desert.” Faded silhouettes of palms are clouded by white in both paintings – sandstorms maybe, or just the haze of heat.

“Everywhere in Iraq there are palms, like in the States? California? The south? Except in the north, where like you we have other trees” – he makes a motion of descending triangles with his hands.

“Cedars. Pine trees,” I reply. “Like in Lebanon.”

“But the marshes, they are like another world.” Gesticulating, he looks in Arabic for the English word for Martian, or planet, or outerspace. “When I was there, it was like another… planet? People live on the water.”

But he’s not from Basra he’s from Baghdad. He left some three years ago, escaping violence that made a man a target for the militias – in his case Shi’a – because his name – a Sunni name – was suddenly a threat. He won’t go back now. One day “God willing” he will go back, when it is no longer this confessional society, its new meanings enforced by ethnic cleansing and blast and sectarian walls, and when parks and traffic circles and public schools are not being renamed after Shi’a clerics. No more Abu Nawas. No more Salah-ad-Din.

When it is the old Iraq, or even a better new one, when its capital Baghdad can be his home again, a place for an artist – there are so many of them – who were educated there, trained there, members of artist unions there, then forced onto a truck or a taxi, their paintings and supplies strapped to roofs and shoved in suitcases, driving through the desert to Syria, for Damascus, for a refuge. Where they paint today, trying to sell their work for a sum, wondering among other things, like Khalid does, where is the artists’ festival?

“They have celebrity festivals, for musicians, for Nancy Ajram, in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Beirut,” he says. “Where is our festival? Our bi…” Biennial is on the tip of his tongue.

“I want to meet more artists, talk to them, talk to me.”

 He sighs and offers us more tea.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Iraq, Syria, Writing , artists in exile, refugees

Righto

Filed under: Iraq, Media , cartoons, Iraq, This Modern World, Tom Tomorrow

“Did the New York Times not know that `Abdu-s-Sattar is dead?”

A sign of the state of American reporting in Iraq? The New York Times printed a story on the “pacified” Anbar province earlier this week, with the following photo and caption:

“Iraq’s national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, right, and Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a Sunni sheik, on Monday in Ramadi.”

Problem is, Abdul Sattar was killed last September in a high profile assassination by Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. It was pretty big news, since he was the “key Sunni ally” of the US in Anbar, a figurehead for the so-called Sunni Awakening (how much did the Pentagon pay him, you wonder?). He was among other Anbar Sunni tribal leaders who met Bush in Iraq in early September 2007, barely a week before he was killed in a bombing near his home. Maybe the Times forgot about all that. After all, in this article about the shift from violence to apparent calm in Anbar, Dexter Filkins doesn’t even mention Abdul Sattar’s assassination.

Source and title quote: Angry Arab News Service.

Filed under: Iraq, Media , Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, Anbar, Angry Arab, correction, Dexter Filkins, gaffe, Iraq, New York Times