Time Capsule: Najaf, Iraq-April, 2003

A young man hoists a poster of Hazrat Imam Hussayn riding his horse Zuljanah during the battle of Karbala in 680 a.d.. ©2003 Derek Henry Flood

Mothers carry their children above the fray in front of the shrine of Imam Ali ibn Talib in Najaf. ©2003 Derek Henry Flood

A young Iraqi boy salutes my old Canon camera on the streets of the holy city. ©2003 Derek Henry Flood

A Shia tribesman from southern Iraq circumambulates the shrine of Imam Ali ibn Talib. ©2003 Derek Henry Flood

New York- I was flipping through some now very old seeming contact sheets from my pre-digital, post-9/11 adventures where the neoconservatives were hard at work (though hardly working in their scant understanding of Middle Eastern history) reshaping a region they knew virtually nothing about outside of their beloved Judea and Samaria. I decided to scan a couple of these photos, which have never been seen, and share them with the amorphous online community. They were taken in the holy city of Najaf and depict the explosion of collective religious emotion among Iraq’s historically oppressed Shia population following the deposement of President Saddam Hussein by the United States. These were Donald Rumsfeld’s crudely generalized “free people” just before the many years of fitna (inter religious warfare) set in.

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