Despite the agony and oppression that Iraq was undergoing in the former regime.
Yet when they first announced that Iraq was to be invaded by the US and NATO alliance a sudden troubled feeling captured my heart. I have seen the repercussions of war before in Beirut. I know what it does to people and to the country and I did not want to see the same thing happening to my own country. That once beautiful country has been bombed with one of the most sophisticated & unlawful weapons used in history. The price to achieve democracy was too heavy in comparison to the destruction during the war and even after the war had ended.
With vain and despair I continued scrutinizing the after-math of war. Nothing seemed so right. There was no sheer hope for unity and reform chaos is everywhere. People have been displaced from one town to the other due to their ethnicity. Terrorists and mercenaries from different countries have now landed on my country soil and tearing it apart. Infrastructure was completely ruined. High unemployment rates, adolescents on the verge of a breakdown have now opted for drugs that are coming from Iran. Iraq was one of the cleanest societies in terms of drugs. Perhaps out of the 24 million who inhibit Iraq only 0.05% were on some kind of drugs – mostly cough syrups.
Now, parts of Southern Iraq are forming drug cartels.
Schools and hospitals are not ready for proper education or medical treatment. Almost half of our women are widowed and half of that half have turned into prostitution in Iraq and elsewhere in neighboring countries, needless to say of course, the child and woman trafficking that has been going on ever since the war erupted and ended.
All of that just tore my heart into pieces. I cannot see this, I cannot bear it silently. I started collecting old newspapers and gluing them onto paintings. I have a message, a statement, enough of war, enough of terrorism, enough of blood, enough of disunity and racism. Here are silk cuttings and towels, in another painting aluminum foil and towels burnt. Newspaper clippings barely recognized, but they are there in the background. Old rags of clothes tied up in a knot and splashed by red. Etchings of people wrapped in newspapers or silk and then splashed with mud. All of those were combined into my paintings to portray as far as I can what was going on there. Each painting has a story to tell of the devastation people underwent. Each has a message, saying no to war, no to hatred, no to blood.
