I heard that the Iraqi Parliament voted to stop building this wall. Does that mean its gonna be knocked down? The contractor who built these concrete barriers must be laughing while he counts his money. They are all over Baghdad in ministries, hotels, banks. Hell the whole green zone is surrounded by them. Does anyone know who built these structures? Answers on a post card please.
I heard it was a Kurdish company that built the barriers. According to reports the walls would cost $100 million dollars. The A3damiya wall cost $10 million. Report from youtube:
if this kurd company win the contract 4 this walls and the american decide they dont use them what will happen 2 the money? iraqi gov vote 2 stop this wall so the kurd who build it was paid fr nothing.?
Actually I think its a great idea. As far as I know the artists are not being sponsored to do this by the government so its the truest for of free expression which reaches a very large audience. Good for them!
Iraqi artists paint Baghdad war walls 2007/4/30 - By Khalil Jalil BAGHDAD, AFP
In a city disfigured by barbed wire, blast walls and bomb craters, Iraqi painters are transforming ugly barriers born of civil strife into vistas of the country's enduring natural beauty. Around 50 artists have assembled along the median of Al-Sadun street, a main thoroughfare of the battle-weary capital, to paint pastoral scenes on the blast walls that split the street in half.
"By painting we hope to break through the psychological barriers Iraqis suffer from. They have become fed up with these walls that separate streets and provoke resentment," said 44-year-old Mahir Hamud.
"We are trying to give each painting a specific theme taken from the environment of our most prominent cities, to show their beauty and bring about calm and peace in the minds of the people."
The wall sections, each nine meters (yards) long and two meters high, are part of the vast network of concrete blocks and concertina wire that carves up the capital, where bloody attacks are a daily occurrence. What the U.S. military dubs its "concrete caterpillar" is gradually crawling through the city, in some cases walling in entire neighborhoods, in others fortifying markets to protect them from car bombs.
American commanders consider such barriers to be an important part of the Baghdad security crackdown announced on February 14, but many Iraqis believe they exacerbate sectarian divisions. Last week a wave of popular resistance erupted over the proposed erection of walls around the Sunni district of Adhamiyah and new barricades around nearby Sadr City, bastion of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Hundreds of Sunnis from Adhamiya angrily protested against the wall, as did around 300 Sadr supporters from the other side of the fault line who marched in Sadr City chanting "No, no to sectarian isolation."
"We, the sons of the Iraqi people, will defend Adhamiyah as long as we can, as well as defending the other regions that they want to isolate from us," his officials said, reading a statement from Sadr over a loudspeaker. The military says the walls were being built to protect residents on both sides of the sectarian divide from marauding death squads and car bombers. But both Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and Kurdish President Jalal Talabani have also criticized the project.
Rather than demand the removal of the wall on Al-Sadun street, artists have instead resolved to transform the barriers into urban art. And instead of the graffiti and political street art that daubed the Berlin Wall and the Israeli security barrier in the occupied West Bank, these painters are aiming for more classic landscapes.
"We hope these paintings will revive this street which was one of the most important in the Iraqi capital, a street where Baghdadis used to come to enjoy the outdoors," Hamud said. The paintings capture the country's often overlooked natural beauty, with scenes from the green mountains of Kurdistan in the north and the vast alluvial marshes of the south.
The wetlands, a unique ecosystem of diverse plant and animal life and home to several Arab tribes, were partly drained by Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War and are only now starting to recover.
"This artistic project reminds Iraqis of their cities and their natural environment, so that they feel that it's theirs and that they must be proud of it," 36-year-old artist Taha Abdul Aal said.
"I think what unites us as Iraqis is our love of the beauty of our cities, our lands, and our eternal attachment to our country," he added.
"Even during working days, people stop to gaze" at the paintings, Mohammed Dokhan, 33, said. "They praise these works, which have given them a sense of delight, instead of the cement blocks that used to cause suffocation." The project, launched and paid for by the Baghdad municipality as part of a larger effort to spruce up the city, calls for each artist to complete forty barriers extending over 500 meters.
The american pay this artists to paint the wall. azinorm in Iraq everything cost money. Now you can buy and sel every thing. no person do anything for free BALASH. Forget it
As far as I know the Iraqi Parliament voted to halt the building of the A3thamiya wall but others are continuing to be built regardless. If you watch Al Iraqia they conducted a series of interviews with locals who were praising the wall for easing their security concerns. All the interviews seemed staged to me. New Iraqi propaganda at work!
This is a great article written by an Iraqi Girl blogger.
by Riverbend The Great Wall of Segregation
Which is the wall the current Iraqi government is building (with the support and guidance of the Americans). It's a wall that is intended to separate and isolate what is now considered the largest "Sunni" area in Baghdad--let no one say the Americans are not building anything. According to plans the Iraqi puppets and Americans cooked up, it will "protect" A'adhamiya, a residential/mercantile area that the current Iraqi government and their death squads couldn't empty of Sunnis.
The wall, of course, will protect no one. I sometimes wonder if this is how the concentration camps began in Europe. The Nazi government probably said, "Oh look--we're just going to protect the Jews with this little wall here--it will be difficult for people to get into their special area to hurt them!" And yet, it will also be difficult to get out. The Wall is the latest effort to further break Iraqi society apart. Promoting and supporting civil war isn't enough, apparently--Iraqis have generally proven to be more tenacious and tolerant than their mullahs, ayatollahs, and Vichy leaders. It's time for America to physically divide and conquer, like Berlin before the wall came down or Palestine today. This way, they can continue chasing Sunnis out of "Shia areas" and Shia out of "Sunni areas."
I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq's history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven't been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.
I remember Baghdad before the war--one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were--we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it, depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night. On a personal note, we've finally decided to leave. I guess I've known we would be leaving for a while now. We discussed it as a family dozens of times. At first, someone would suggest it tentatively because, it was just a preposterous idea--leaving one's home and extended family--leaving one's country--and to what? To where?
Since last summer, we had been discussing it more and more. It was only a matter of time before what began as a suggestion, a last case scenario, soon took on solidity and developed into a plan. For the last couple of months, it has only been a matter of logistics. Plane or car? Jordan or Syria? Will we all leave together as a family? Or will it be only my brother and I at first? After Jordan or Syria, where then? Obviously, either of those countries is going to be a transit to something else. They are both overflowing with Iraqi refugees, and every single Iraqi living in either country is complaining of the fact that work is difficult to come by, and getting a residency is even more difficult. There is also the little problem of being turned back at the border. Thousands of Iraqis aren't being let into Syria or Jordan, and there are no definite criteria for entry, the decision is based on the whim of the border patrol guard checking your passport. An airplane isn't necessarily safer, as the trip to Baghdad International Airport is in itself risky and travelers are just as likely to be refused permission to enter the country (Syria and Jordan) if they arrive by airplane. And if you're wondering why Syria or Jordan, because they are the only two countries that will let Iraqis in without a visa. Following up visa issues with the few functioning embassies or consulates in Baghdad is next to impossible.
So we've been busy. Busy trying to decide what part of our lives to leave behind. Which memories are dispensable? We, like many Iraqis, are not the classic refugees, the ones with only the clothes on their backs and no choice. We are choosing to leave because the other option is simply a continuation of what has been one long nightmare: stay and wait and try to survive. On the one hand, I know that leaving the country and starting a new life somewhere else--as yet unknown--is such a huge thing that it should dwarf every trivial concern. The funny thing is that it's the trivial that seems to occupy our lives. We discuss whether to take photo albums or leave them behind. Can I bring along a stuffed animal I've had since the age of four? Is there room for E.'s guitar? What clothes do we take? Summer clothes? The winter clothes too? What about my books? What about the CDs, the baby pictures?
The problem is that we don't even know if we'll ever see this stuff again. We don't know if whatever we leave, including the house, will be available when and if we come back. There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country, simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends... And to what? It's difficult to decide which is more frightening: car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.
This is an entry from Baghdad Burning, the excellent blog by the young Iraqi woman calling herself Riverbend. It can be found at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com.
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