Resistance Songs Best-Seller In Iraq: U.S. Paper

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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Resistance Songs Best-Seller In Iraq: U.S. Paper

FALLUJAH, December 29 (IslamOnline.net) – Nine months of what many Iraqis see as a long-standing occupation of their oil-rich country, resistance songs are the best-seller here, an American newspaper reported Sunday, December 28.

Taking many shapes and forms, the Iraqi resistance against the U.S.-led occupation turned to music, a popular form among young people, said The Miami Herald reported.
Singer Sabah Hashim needed no promotion at the Sound of the Revolution music shop.

Hashim, the most favored among Iraqi young men, is part of a new growing group of Iraqi singers formed after the occupation and calls in their anti-Western lyrics for fighting occupies.

A part of Hashim’s latest collection called “The Anger” urge listeners to “carry your weapons and kick the heretic people out of your land. The people of Fallujah are like wolves when they attack the enemy”.
Fallujah was the scene of a bloody U.S. military attack during a demonstration calling for an end to occupation in April. More than nine people shot dead in the protests, drawing fury among local inhabitants.
In the theater, Hashim usually sings against a backdrop of images of occupation for his homeland, said the Herald.

Images of the American F-16 firing at a target followed by huge, orange explosions; Iraqi women mourning their dead sons; American soldiers arresting Iraqis are among daily images in Iraq shown in the backdrop.
Other scenes of resistance celebration shows a group of Iraqis celebrating around a destroyed U.S. tank.
‘Popular’

These songs are especially popular in cities like Fallujah and across the Sunni Triangle, where resistance against U.S. occupying troops has been heavy as a way of rejecting the U.S. occupation.
Nudher Aboud, 36, a jobless father who bought “The Anger” recently at the shop said that these songs is an effective way to urge the Iraqis to fight occupation and help resistance.
“When I hear this music, it provokes me to help the resistance,” he said.

Ehab Thaya, 20, reported high score of selling estimated by 75 copies of The Anger a week, the store owner.
Another music store owner, Noori Hashim, 30, who sells a video CD version of “The Anger” collection, also reports brisk sales, mostly to young men.

Different Genres
Resistance songs played rarely on local radio stations or in restaurants but is often played at weddings varies as some sounds like Arab pop music using drums and guitars and others are more religious.
Many singers come from Sunni towns especially from Fallujah and Mosul suffering from both the U.S. occupation as well as frustrated over the lack of security, electricity and municipal services, said the Herald .
“We will face death. We will never give up our land,” sings Qassim al Sultan, a singer from Mosul.

“We will remove America from the map,” he added.
But anti-American sentiments are rising among all people of the violence-inflicted country, where promises of a better future and more democracy have proved empty.

Arab Nationalism

Other songs play to Arab nationalism and call on Arabs throughout the Middle East to rally and expel the U.S.-led occupiers.
“Baghdad calls Arabs for militancy and martyrdom,” Adnan Faisal sings.
“From Mosul to Hillah, we are Arabs, and we refuse to be insulted. We are ready for death,” he added.

According to Arab traditions, dying in defense of the country or ending its occupation is an honorable act, and Arab analysts are always keen to draw a difference between resistance and terrorism.

The American paper added that resistance songs touch the listeners with piety as well as putting the singers and listeners on higher moral ground and broaden the fighting occupation message’s appeal.

The Iraqi resistance songs are not a new phenomenon as it appeared before in the song of Shaaban Abdel-Rahim ‘Enough’ which skyrocketed in the Arab capitals and channels.

The song touched on surging feelings of resentment, fervor, passion riled in the restless region as well as the U.S. and British pretexts to attack Iraq

Comment:

The noble resistence continues in Iraq and the muslim will never rest until Iraq is cleansed not just of Saddam and the Baathists but also the western armies and their agents. Only then will the muslims establish the ruling by what Allah swt has revealed and justice and dignity will be restored.

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:smiley:

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Nice ones. :hehe:

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Iraqi War

Less than five years later, however, the U.S. government is teetering on
the edge of another brutal counterinsurgency war in Iraq.

Some supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March are now advocating
an iron fist to quell the growing Iraqi resistance. In a debate in
Berkeley, California, for instance, ardent Bush supporter Christopher
Hitchens declared that the U.S. intervention in Iraq needed to be “more
thoroughgoing, more thought-out and more, if necessary, ruthless.” (See
Salon.com, Nov. 11, 2003.)

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, told a news
conference in Baghdad on November 11 that U.S. forces would follow a new
get-tough strategy against the Iraqi resistance. “We are taking the
fight into the safe havens of the enemy, in the heartland of the
country,” Sanchez said.

But U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Bush enthusiasts at home are
not alone in encouraging a fierce counterinsurgency campaign to throttle
the Iraqi resistance. Though many war critics say the likelihood of a
difficult occupation should have been anticipated before the invasion,
some now agree that the U.S. government must fight and win in Iraq or
the United States will suffer a crippling loss of credibility in the
Middle East and throughout the world.

Wishing for a result, however, can be far different from achieving a
result. Wanting the U.S. forces to prevail and asserting that they must
prevail does not mean that they will prevail. American troops could find
themselves trapped in a long painful conflict against a determined enemy
fighting on its home terrain.

As the United States wades deeper into this Iraqi quicksand, the lessons
of the bloody counterinsurgency wars in Central America will be tempting
to the veterans of the Reagan administration. Those lessons certainly
are the most immediate antecedents to many of the architects of the Iraq
counterinsurgency.

But the Central American lessons may have limited applicability to Iraq.
For one, the Bush administration can’t turn to well-entrenched power
centers with ideologically committed security forces as the Reagan
administration could in Guatemala and other Central American countries.
Also, the cultural divide and the physical distance between Iraq and the
United States are far greater than those between Central America and the
United States.

So even if the Bush administration can hastily set up an Iraqi security
apparatus, it may not be as committed to a joint cause with the
Americans as the Central American paramilitary forces were with the
Reagan administration. Without a reliable proxy force, the
responsibility for conducting a scorched-earth campaign in Iraq likely
would fall to American soldiers who themselves might question the wisdom
and the morality of such an undertaking.

** Perhaps one of the lessons of the current dilemma is that George W. Bush may have dug such a deep hole for U.S. policy in Iraq that even
Guatemalan-style brutality applied to the Sunni Triangle would only
deepen the well of anti-Americanism that already exists in many parts of Iraq and across much of the Islamic world.

As a correspondent for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, Robert Parry broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra Affair. To buy his latest book, Lost History, go to Amazon.com or to the Consortiumnews.com order page. **