Photo by Walid Jawad. "Palm trees are everywhere in Iraq," says artist Ahmad AlKarkhi. "You grow up seeing them everywhere." AlKarkhi fled from Baghdad in 2006, but he continues to paint his memories of his war-torn homeland.
My friend is from Basra, an Iraqi city on the borders of Iran and Kuwait, which once held the world's most dense and extensive date palm groves. During the Iran-Iraq war, those thick rows of palm trees acted as a natural barrier --- you couldn't see far distances through them.
The brutality of that long war destroyed many groves through bombing, but the greater tragedy came from Saddam Hussein's regime, who burned some of those groves deliberately to clear sightlines for the army to shoot and defend against incoming fire.
