Baghdad's Unlikely Muralists

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In the spring of 2007, Iraqi grocer Omar Fadhil came to work a little after dawn and found the US Army putting up a 20-foot-high cement barrier outside his sundries store. The pear-shaped 48-year-old father of three dismissed the wall as another futile and desperate US attempt to stem the sectarian violence that had turned much of the Iraqi capital into a grim killing field. Within days, insurgents had scrawled “Long live al-Qaeda,” “Death to collaborators,” and other sinister slogans on the newly erected wall. “Every day I read that graffiti and was reminded that bad people controlled my city,” said Fadhil. “I kept my head down and my mouth shut and prayed for my family’s survival.”

But a few months later, on another routine workday, Fadhil found half a dozen young students from the nearby Arts College busily covering the menacing threats with murals of smiling Iraqi peasants tilling bucolic fields, Arabian horsemen charging unseen enemies, and other utopian scenes. “It was the first time I remember thinking that just maybe there was hope for this country,” says Fadhil.

Iraq’s cement T-walls —so called because their broad base gives them the shape of an upside-down T—have become an icon of the Iraq war. Shortly after the invasion, the US built a massive T-wall ring around Saddam Hussein’s palace district, the seven-square-mile Green Zone that became the heart of the US occupation after 2003. Composed of thousands of seven-ton cement blocks, standing 12 to 20 feet high and 4½ feet thick, the walls kept insurgents out and the Americans in.

As the insurgency picked up speed and car bombings became a daily scourge, the unsightly walls started to spread throughout the city, encompassing government buildings, mosques, and other likely targets. Then, in early 2007, the US flooded 30,000 additional soldiers into Baghdad in a last-ditch bid to separate the warring Sunni and Shiite sects. With the additional forces came a new US commander, General David Petraeus, who walled off entire Baghdad neighborhoods, segregating Sunnis from Shiites and staunching the easy flow of militants through the city. The violence started to drop—as much as 63 percent in just two months in Fadhil’s neighborhood of Adhamiya, according to US military officials at the time. But the walls remained an ugly stain on the city, turning neighborhoods into prisons, snarling traffic, and blocking access to businesses and homes.

In 2007, a handful of US-funded NGOs commissioned local artists to paint the comparatively few cement walls that dotted the city at that time. When the walls began proliferating, the Iraqi government got on board with the project. It, along with Western NGOs and the American military, has since doled out scores of grants to local artists, who have been paid anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars and given simple instructions. “They told me to paint something about unity, that represented all Iraqis,” says Hussein al-Mutalib, a 29-yearold painter and gallery owner in Baghdad, who was among the first artists commissioned by the Iraqi government at the height of the killing between the country’s Sunni and Shiite sects.

Painting the walls also became a quick and easy jobs program. In Fallujah, US Marines kept military-age males away from the insurgency by paying them twelve dollars a day to paint flowers, doves, and pro-peace slogans on the hundreds of cement barriers in the former insurgent hotbed. But perhaps most important, the murals serve as a scorecard in the battle against shadowy insurgents. Last spring, in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, which has remained one of al-Qaeda’s last urban sanctuaries, US commanders ordered soldiers to keep tabs on graffiti in the neighborhoods they patrolled, as a means of measuring where the enemy was strongest. When Shiite militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr decided to stand down his forces last year, he ordered them to continue the fight by scrawling anti-American slogans on the cement barriers. Operations against insurgents across Iraq are followed immediately by campaigns to wipe out the enemy’s graffiti and replace it with pro-government phrases and murals.

“The people see artists working for days out in the open without fear of being attacked, and they start to feel safe,” says Iraqi government spokesman Tahseen al-Sheikhly. “We hope the paintings will be the first step toward returning beauty to Iraq.”

The murals are in bold primary colors and in soft pastels. They are pointillist, cubist, abstract, and realist. They depict rainbows, Rubik’s cubes, sailboats, Swiss peaks, palm groves, and pristine marshes. The paintings have a message directed at a people struggling to heal after two years of civil war. Doves burst through Iraqi flags beneath slogans such as “Yes to unity.” Murals of Sumerian kings, Ottoman-era street scenes, and ancient Tigris River waterwheels remind Iraqis of a common and glorious past. Other paintings show what might be if the violence stops: on Baghdad’s airport road, futuristic Baghdad cityscapes depict glimmering skyscrapers rising above spotless tree-lined boulevards.

Baqr al-Sheikh is a rising young star on the Iraqi art scene. He smokes Gauloises cigarettes and says he’s trying to pioneer a new style of abstract realism in his painting. “I paint the soft edges hard and the hard edges soft,” he says of his latest works. Al-Sheikh painted some of the earliest murals in Baghdad but has since soured on the project. “The murals show a glorified past and an impossible future,” says the 33-year-old artist. “They show everything except the modern-day reality. Where is the sewage and trash that litter Baghdad’s streets? We might have had new skyscrapers if billions of dollars of reconstruction money hadn’t been stolen and wasted. The artist’s job is to portray the world as it is, not spread propaganda for the government.”

On the other side is Qassim al-Sabti, one of Iraq’s best-known living artists. Al-Sabti has been a driving force behind the mural project since the beginning. Between exhibitions in New York, Paris, and one about to open this October in Tokyo, he has rallied his students at Baghdad’s Fine Arts Institute to use their talents to beautify the city.

He sips Orange Fanta in the shade at the Hawar Café, the legendary watering hole for Iraqi artists in Baghdad’s Waziriya district. Al-Sabti was against the war and opposes the ongoing US occupation, but many of the first murals he helped put up on Baghdad’s walls were paid for with American dollars. Other murals were paid for by the Iraqi government, “a gang of sectarian clerics, religious fundamentalists, and outright thieves,” in al-Sabti’s words. But he doesn’t mind.

“With these paintings, I am shaking the hand of my enemy,” he says. “Art becomes dialogue, and dialogue is our only hope. We need to make art, not war.”

"Baghdad's Unlikely Muralists" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.