“Remembering” is part of an ongoing series, with young Iraqi reporters asking members of their community to reflect on important moments in their lives. This story was written by Ashna Shareff, a 21-year old reporter living in Erbil.
The day Bero Abdullah left Erbil she was sure she wouldn’t come back. The city was almost empty. Everyone had fled to surrounding villages because they feared an attack by the Iraqi Army.
The residents of Erbil – known in Kurdish as Hawler – remember the start of the second Iraq invasion in April 2003 because of their constant fear that Saddam Hussein would carry out attacks with chemical weapons as he had done in the town of Halabja in 1988.
“I was coming back home and, on the way, my friends and I were writing memories for each other because we were sure that we wouldn’t see each other again,” Bero said.
Bero, 21, is from Rawandz but now lives with her family in Erbil and attends Salahaddin University.
Just before the second Iraq war started, Bero’s family shared a house, food and even clothing among 11 people. There were five from her family and six people from her uncle’s family all living together. At the time, Bero was 15 years old.
She came home one day and all the family’s things were packed. Her father insisted that they go to their hometown of Rawandz.
“He was sure that Rawandz was the best place to keep us safe from Saddam’s threat,” Bero said.
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Katherine Gypson
While producing PUL – AAM’s weekly interview program for Afghanistan’s Tolo TV – I often come across great background material that illuminates hidden corners of Afghan life.
These reports and papers may ultimately make their way into the final program as a question to a guest or a statistic in the show’s introduction but most of the time they serve as backup research, one piece in the foundation that allows American producers and an Afghan-American host to create a perspective that informs and speaks to an Afghan audience.
We recently taped three new shows for Afghanistan. The first episode looked at a topic that’s just beginning to get widespread attention in Afghanistan: environmental issues. Before the Soviet Invasion of 1979, Afghanistan had a reputation as being “the orchard of Asia.” More than thirty years later, the country faces almost every environmental challenge possible: from air pollution in rapidly expanding cities to severe droughts and deforestation in rural areas.
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Katherine Gypson
Just returning to a snow covered DC from four days in the greater Detroit area, where I traveled with our partner Mithat Bereket, leading host for Turkey’s public television station TRT, to film a documentary on Islam in America. Michigan has one of America’s largest, and one of the world’s most diverse, Muslim populations. Ranging from Arab American to African American, Sunni to Shia, recent immigrant to third generation, you’d be hard pressed to find a Muslim community not represented in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. We barely scratched the surface of the Bangladeshi, Yemeni, or South Asian communities. But I did manage to get a close look at two vastly different Muslim communities.
On Saturday we spent most of our day with Imam Abdullah El Amin and his congregation at the Muslim Center of Detroit. After leaving our hotel in suburban Dearborn, and navigating the tangled web of freeways in the heart of Ford country, we arrive at an unassuming white brick building in a dilapidated neighborhood of urban Detroit. 
Many of the surrounding houses are windowless and boarded up, and the ‘main streets’ in the area are a wasteland of “Coney Island’ fast food establishments, car dealerships, businesses and restaurants which look as though they’ve been out of business for years. We walk into the masjid, which serves the largest congregation of African American Muslims in the area, and are greeted warmly by several members of the congregation eager to share their mosque with a Turkish television audience. The Muslim Center, which was originally a bank before being incorporated as a mosque in 1985, seems more of a community center than a mosque. While they gather for prayer five times a day, their Saturday is also brimming with community service activity.
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Ilana Weinberg America, Detroit, Islam, Muslims, Religion
First, for some context. I am writing currently from Cusco, Peru where I am on a 2-week journalism program. It is the Gatekeepers Editors trip organized by the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University. We are traveling the country to learn about health, environment, development, resource, and indigenous issues, and we are also learning about another growing sector of the economy: gastronomy.
Peru is an export nation. Gold, silver, oil, coffee, and now asparagus. The nation is growing into an agricultural force, providing an assortment of fruits, grains, and vegetables for the world market. But it’s not just providing the raw materials. Peru is now an exporter of cuisine, and not just the traditional Andean dishes of lomo saltado or chupe. Today, the country is leading a movement in Nuevo Andean cuisine.
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Sean Carberry
Ninety-eight years ago today, Leanardo’s Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was stolen right off the wall from the Louvre Museum in Paris. While the painting was missing, visitors to the museum came to solemnly stare at the empty space on the wall, where the Mona Lisa had once hung. It was missing for more than two years before an Italian named Leonardo Vincenzo offered the painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Leonardo Vincenzo, whose real name was Vincenzo Peruggia was arrested later and he claimed his only goal was to return it to Italy.
Interpol recently created a secure database on stolen art which currently contains 34,000 works of stolen art. Most cases center around many of the works of art stolen from the Jewish people during World War II. The Nazis formed a bureaucracy devoted to looting and they plundered a total of 650,000 art and religious objects from Jews and other victims, the Jewish Claims Conference estimates. The new database will be a significant resource for many. From Deutsche-Welle:
During that time, “a relocation of cultural items took place whose full scope has still not been completely explored and investigated,” according to the Coordination Office for Lost Cultural Assets, located in Magdeburg.
The agency hopes that by opening up access to the database to the public and to concerned cultural and professional bodies it will be that much more difficult for a seller or purchaser to claim not having had the opportunity to check whether an item was recorded as stolen.
The latest big event to take place in front of the Mona Lisa was last week when a Russian woman hurled a cup at the painting.
Javier Barrera Art
Daoud Sediqi, the former host and director of Afghan Star (Afghanistan’s version of American Idol), discussed the Sundance award-winning film with AAM. The film documents the TV talent show, cultural conflicts and its impact on the people of Afghanistan. In AAM’s exclusive interview with Sediqi, he talks about his experiences as host and why he recently fled his home country.
Javier Barrera Afghanistan
This week marks the start of Monsoon season in Hyderabad, India. That means it’s also time for an annual festival that draws tens of thousands seeking what they believe is a cure for asthma – the Bathini Brothers Fish Festival. Over the course of 24 auspicious hours, tens of thousands of asthmatics will all seek a cure in the form of a yellow wad of medicinal herbs, stuffed inside a small, live, fish. The patients then swallow the fish, still wriggling, with the help of one of the Bathini family members.
According to Sangeev Bathini Tegulla, whose family inherited the secret cure over 160 years ago from a Hindu medicine man, “The fish clears the channels, the body has different channels, right, and the medicine goes through all the body.”
Sangeev now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, but returned to help with the festival. The family offers the cure for free, but won’t disclose what’s in it. Even Sangeev has to wait until his generation is trusted with that knowledge – that’s how closely guarded the secret is.
For maximum effectiveness, those seeking relief also follow a strict diet of 27 items, including old rice, dried mango, and, in case of emergency: “A biscuit.”
If you think this all sounds a little…fishy…you’re not alone. There are plenty who doubt there’s any proven medicinal value in the ritual and have even taken the Bathini family to court to try to stop the festival. But the tens of thousands lined up here today seem undeterred. Undoubtedly they’ll be back next year too, right at the start of the Monsoon season, for another dosage.
Matt Ozug South Asia
The day Bero Abdullah left Erbil she was sure she wouldn’t come back. The city was almost empty. Everyone had fled to surrounding villages because they feared an attack by the Iraqi Army.
