Indigo-Daisy

I know I am stretching the definition of 'Iraqi' here, but Deborah Abdulla is married to an Iraqi and her children are half Iraqi. Anyway, its such a great blog that I will have to make her my honorary Iraqi for the week just to include it.

Indigo-Daisy is about poetry (her own and others), peace, recipes and fun. Here is a sample...

The laws of my soul

there are three major types of laws that people will follow,

the laws of the land,
the laws of the church,
and the laws of the soul

if there should come a time when they are not equal, and I must choose one over the other
I shall choose to follow my soul,
for I can step outside of the land and the church,
but I can not step outside my soul.

~Deborah Abdulla

LGBTQ of Iraq

LGBTQ of Iraq blogs in Arabic and, he assures me, soon, in English about Lesbian and Gay issues in Iraq. Lesbians and Gays are regularly singled out and targeted by the various armed groups in Iraq.

Most Iraqis of my father generation will make a face like they have seen something disgusting when you mentions gays. But even my father would point out that a delegation of gays from the UK visited Iraq in the 1930's because, at that time, gays had more rights in Iraq than they did in Britain. This is because what you did in the privacy of your own home in Iraq is treated as your own business and nobody else's. Now with the extremist militias running freely imposing there own perverse laws not even the home is safe. And rights for gays and lesbians has become an important issue. Simply because if don't care about this one then you will be next.

Armenian Issues

I read today one Iraqi football fan saying "Iraqi is like a bunch of flowers not a pie to be divided". And Ara Ashjian is one of those flowers, reporting from Baghdad on the travails of the Iraqi Armenian community. Read here to find links to all the Armenian blogger, the latest issues worrying the Armenian community in Iraq to the Iraqi Armenian who became a health minister in the UK!