Ah, Youth


The attractive young women pictured above look like they could be typical US college students studying dance...or at least that's what I thought when viewing the slideshow. But instead, their lives have been turned upside down, no pun intended, by the chaos of "Mission Accomplished:"

In today’s Iraq, with conservative religious parties and radical militias exerting growing influence over every aspect of life, even dancing is an act of bravery.

“Society is overwhelmed by these religious ideologies,” said Tariq Ibrahim, a male dancer in the Baghdad troupe, the Iraqi National Folklore Group. “Now a woman on the street without a head scarf attracts attention. What about a woman onstage dancing?”

Together they are a band of 10 women and 15 men from varied religious backgrounds. Once they toured the world together. Today they are simply trying to survive, hoping one day to thrive again as a troupe. But the religiosity sweeping Iraq does not bode well for their future.

Female participation in folk dancing is considered haram, or forbidden, in Islam. Ayatollah al-Sistani, the leading Shiite cleric in Iraq, has issued strict guidelines against dancing in various situations. The country’s Shiite-led government, the dancers said, is naturally trying to marginalize them.

“Religion in its essence does not match with art,” said Fouad Thanoon, the group’s director and lead choreographer. “So when religion and government come together, that will affect art very much.”

The group has more immediate worries about extremists. Recently one of its members, Bushra Yousif, 21, a petite woman with delicate features who has been with the group for six years, received a note at home warning her to leave within 48 hours. A bullet was included in the envelope.

She was probably singled out because of her profession, she said, but she will continue to attend rehearsals every day. She loves dancing too much, she said describing it as the highest form of art to “deliver a message through your body.”

The entire article briefly chronicles the history of the Group, which, despite the thuggery of Saddam Hussein, managed to survive and, at times, even thrive. Now, thanks to Operation Enduring Clusterfuck, the very concept of "the arts" might well become a thing of the past in Mesopotamia...and, for the artists themselves, mere survival is a dicey, deadly game.

And yet there are some numbnuts who think we've been too "soft" in the course of the invasion...to them, every person in the region is "the enemy," and must be dealt with accordingly, even to the point of using nuclear weapons. To snuff out the lives of...pretty young women.