Rounded Analysis On Contested Issues; Spotlighting Blind Spots; Politics, Religion, Travel, Books
In 2016, Iraq was reaping the bitter fruits of the adventurism of another westerner Paul Bremer, who fell back upon the colonial divide-and-rule policy to counter a broad-based challenge to the American occupation and prepared the ground for ISIS to tap into resentment over the Sunni purge
A tapering gateway of inscriptions and geometric themes now leads to Mustansiriya University, one of the world’s oldest universities which survived the Mongol onslaught, floods, and manmade and natural calamities that claimed much of Baghdad’s heritage over centuries
Abbasid Baghdad had a sanitation department to ensure streets were regularly swept, washed, and free of refuse when London and Paris were ‘still grainy and chaotic little towns'
The Sinak Bridge in Baghdad offered a breathtaking view of the snaking Tigris in the Cradle of Civilization, where pivotal technological innovations such as writing, the wheel, and irrigation originated
The violence had begun to ebb by 2016 but corroded car bomb hulks, and abandoned, bombed out and bullet-riddled buildings represented the horrors Baghdad, the city of about seven million, had suffered
Nahdlatul Ulama cited ISIS’s attempt to create a so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria and said it will inevitably be disastrous and contrary to the purposes of sharia—the protection of religion, human life, sound reasoning, family, and property
Cleric Ayatollah Ali al Sistani rallied the demoralised Iraqis in June 2014 by issuing a fatwa calling on all able-bodied to resist ISIS when the terror group controlled 40% of Iraq
