Stories about people losing their mind in Iraq are not different from other places and have their own legends and their protagonists have endless tales to relay. These are people whose minds have deserted them to wander in the lost isthmuses for long stretches. They have their own reasons for this while the different Iraqi authorities have stablished myths and stereotypes about them. Craziness in Iraq, though, has been transformed under the last two political regimes: the former was so incredibly tyrannical that it succeeded in domesticating crazy people, while the latter has mastered chaos and destruction until crazies rejected it.
English
The fools of Baghdad speak up
Articles from Iraq
Burnt Out: On the State of Iraq’s Mental Health
Iraq allocates merely 2% of its health sector’s budget to mental health, while the health sector itself receives no more than 5% of the three-year public budget (for the years...
Death is a Woman from Şingal
People slept in the streets, and then it happened. Let there be queues, and there were queues. Queues to receive food, beds, and to beg for new guises of displacement....
An Invitation to Grieve: Latif al-Ani’s Photographs in New York
I think of Baghdad’s wounds as I converse with Latif al-Ani’s photographs, which open up like passages through which I travel in time and wander beyond the dictatorial borders of...
From the same author
Informal Settlements in Baghdad: Home Is Everywhere
Informal settlements in Baghdad did not develop in one specific form. Some were built on plots of land without title deeds; 98% of which are state-owned and 2% are private...
Iraq’s October Protests: A Political Constant and Social Transformation
As soon as the protests took off, thousands of young people gathered in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, echoing countless concerns and questions. The desperate, the unemployed, the infuriated with families...
Maps of Deprivation and Dissolution in Iraq
In 2011, the Ministry of Planning released a report entitled “Maps of Deprivation in Iraq”; in it, the Iraqi population was divided into a different groups depending on their relationship...