#baghdad

Aerial photo of the city of Baghdad by @rasoolaliabd on @gettyimages .

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#sunray #lifestylephotographer #photography_top #life_is_street #bestportraits #summertimevibes #seetheworld #portraitphoto #surfphotography #wearethestreet #photographersofinstagram #instagramvideo #doitfortheprocess #destinationweddingphotographer #photographerslife #thenativecreative #amateurphotographer #productphotographer #streetphotographers #newbornphotographer #babyphotographer ⁣

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‎#سياحه #مصور #انستقرامي #بغداد #مول #مصورين #اضافات #الحرم #tanger

crazy-brazilian:

You could make a sitcom out of this.

• Funeral bombing in Baghdad
  
• Suicide bombing in Beirut 
  
• Terrorist attacks in Paris
  
• Earthquakes in Japan and Mexico
  
• UFO sighting videos
  

ALT

ALT

ALT

“On March 5, 2007, a bomb went off in the centuries old Al Mutanabbi Street book sellers district in Baghdad. The explosion took the lives of thirty people and destroyed a large portion of the neighborhood. Al-Mutanabbi Street is named after the famous classical Arab poet Abu at-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi (915–965 CE), and it has been a thriving center of Baghdad’s bookselling and publishing for many years. 

The book sellers, who survived, rebuilt their stores and are once again in business. They sell works by Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, and Jews, children’s books, and progressive publications from around the world. 

A coalition of poets, artists, writers, printers, booksellers, and readers was created within a short time of the bombing; broadsides of their writings and artwork about this tragic event were printed, and recitations were made in many cities.

The 2007 bombing and the destruction of Al-Mutanabbi Street resulted Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts here – book arts and festivals to commemorate the bombing of Baghdad’s historic bookselling street and celebrate freedom of expression.” - Excerpts from Al-Mutanabbi Starts Here website.

Breathe for those who cannot.
Burrell, Ginger.
San Jose : Midnight Moon Press, c2013.
1 vol. ; 13 cm.
English
“Discarded book pages torn, burned and reassembled, original poetry by the artist." 
Edition of 10.

Ali

Ali al-Makhzomy was 17 in 2005 when his older brother — handsome, popular — threw him the keys to his Range Rover and said he was walking to a friends’ house. He never came back.

“Two weeks later we received a call from his phone — the guy said, ‘We have Mohammad and we want money.’” Mohammad was a subcontractor for the US military and made a decent salary. But the $250,000 they were asking for was an impossible amount. The kidnappers agreed to accept his vehicle instead of ransom money. But they didn’t release him.

Mohammad was 29 when he disappeared. He was Ali’s hero. They shared a bedroom at the family home in Baghdad. Ali would iron his older brother’s clothes for him. “I would do anything he asked,” he says. “When I walked down the street I was never afraid because I thought, ‘I have my brother watching my back.’”

Ali’s father died of a heart attack two years before the Iraq War. After his brother’s kidnapping, Ali was the only male left in the family.

“It’s not just my family — you can find in all the families in Iraq now there is a crisis. Either someone has gone missing or someone has been killed.”

Asala

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was one of the most isolated countries in the world. Most young Iraqis had never seen a cell phone or satellite television before 2003. Ideas and information were considered dangerous and both phones and satellite dishes were banned. The internet was censored, monitored and available only in public cafes. When the regime fell, the barriers to the outside world did as well.

Those new links out inspired new interests for young people like Asala, who is now 19. But at the same time, years of war gave rise to more conservative, religious cultures. Between the expectations of their parents and of society, a lot of young women here feel unable to pursue their dreams.

Asala doesn’t have close friends in which to confide. But she chats every day online with French and Austrian friends she discovered through a Korean pop fan page. “We all got super close,” she says. It was her online friends who told her she seemed depressed.

“I said, ‘Wait, depressed? Depression — what is that?’ So I looked it up and I have the symptoms. It’s horrible. At this age you are supposed to go out and have fun. But [in Iraq] you deal with things that are so much bigger than you. You worry about how are you going to live if things get worse. You even worry about if you are going to make it to the next day. Death is pretty much surrounding you. It’s really depressing.”

Daoud

Soccer is a favorite pastime and a national passion. It is a part of almost every Iraqi’s childhood. Two years ago, Daoud Asager and his friends played a game of soccer on a July evening. He was 24 at the time. Neighborhood children lined the field as the sun fell below the horizon and the summer heat burned away.

Asager saw the car approach. The soccer field erupted in flames.

“I saw one of my friends on the ground hit by pieces of the car. Then I saw two children who were on fire. They were walking and their bodies were on fire. I will never forget that sight.”

The suicide car bombing — now a regular feature of growing up in Iraq — killed four of his friends that day. It was one of a series of coordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed a total of 27 people.

The war had finally struck too close for Daoud. Traumatized, he decided to get out.

“I wanted a peaceful life. I didn’t want war,” he says.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-28/raised-by-war-iraq-longread