Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It goes like this. An Indian shaman visited Baghdad in the 1990s, when Iraq was suffocating under international sanctions targeting then-dictator, Saddam Hussein. He tried to convince a group of Iraqis that magic was real and that he could control it.
But an Iraqi soldier, who had survived both the Iran-Iraq war and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, wasn't convinced. “What do you call an entire family who lives a month on a government salary worth one dollar?” he asked. “That’s real magic,” the Indian reluctantly replied.
That’s Iraq. A country that lives on the magic of its people, on their mystifying capacity to survive miseries flung at them over the last 1,400 years. I myself witnessed only the last few years, landing in Baghdad in 2017 to take up a post as Arabic correspondent for Agence France-Presse.
correspondent.afp.com
Everything about Iraq is sad., They had the best medical care and the best education system but for most of my life there has been nothing but stupid wars and stupid sanctions.
But an Iraqi soldier, who had survived both the Iran-Iraq war and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, wasn't convinced. “What do you call an entire family who lives a month on a government salary worth one dollar?” he asked. “That’s real magic,” the Indian reluctantly replied.
That’s Iraq. A country that lives on the magic of its people, on their mystifying capacity to survive miseries flung at them over the last 1,400 years. I myself witnessed only the last few years, landing in Baghdad in 2017 to take up a post as Arabic correspondent for Agence France-Presse.
Baghdad: forever on the brink
Iraq is a country “that lives on the magic of its people, and their mystifying capacity to survive the misery that the last 1,400 years has thrown at them,” writes Ali Choukeir, former deputy bureau chief in Baghdad, who first arrived in the country in 2017. After living side-by-side with Iraqis...
Everything about Iraq is sad., They had the best medical care and the best education system but for most of my life there has been nothing but stupid wars and stupid sanctions.
