Outside the French Embassy, wild horses, flying carpets and fancy castles next to an Iraqi farmer returning home to his family adorn the cement surfaces. 2005 quote "...throb for life"

I hope to make the Iraqi human being feel a kind of happiness when he passes these walls, even if it's temporary. Baquir al-Sheik

MILLIONS + MILLIONS - IRAQ: Millions Trapped in Their Own Country
By Ahmed Ali

 

Iraqis still ask if US invasion was worth it

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 metres (yards) long and two metres 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 US military dubs its "concrete caterpillar" is gradually crawling through the city, in some cases walling in entire neighbourhoods, 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 criticised 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 metres.