![Yazidi holy mountain town of Lalsih, near Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan....Yazidi worshippers perform rituals they believe will bring them good luck at the Sheik Adi ibn Mussafir temple in Lalish, the spiritual home of the Yazidi religion, in the mountains near Dohuk in Iraqi Kurdistan, on August 12, 2014. Hundreds of thousands of Yazidis have been displaced in Northern Iraq due to aggression by the Islamic State. [Sam Tarling for the Telegraph]](https://rosamondpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/yaz2.jpg)
Hundreds of thousands of Yazidis have been displaced in Northern Iraq due to aggression by the Islamic State.
[Sam Tarling for the Telegraph]
This morning I awoke and changed my routine. I turned on my television to get the morning news, instead of my computer, in time to hear Senator Lindsay Graham, blaming the President for all that has gone wrong in Iraq. Acting like the President, this delusional co-terrorist called for 10,000 U.S. troops to go back over to Iraq and trying training cowards to stand and fight. A hundred and seventy-five ISIS fighters took Ramadi from 6,000 policeman who ran and left a large cache of weapons behind. So much for George Bush’s ‘Iraqi Freedom’. It is not for Lindsay to call for war. He is a ne0-confederate traitor using ISIS for political gain for the Tea Party Crazies.
When I awoke, I pondered how I can turn this blog into a work of art that will portray the battle for the Beauty in America without employing weapons.
Yesterday, this blog came under attack by a delusional homeless person I was trying to help.
Jon Presco
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/05/18/intv-amanpour-ali-khedery-isis-ramadi-takeover.cnn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qqLcuQp8do
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/yazidi-artist-brush-death-150503072836745.html
In happier times, Ammar Salim Khidhir dedicated much of his art to children, making larger-than-life statues of characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants from materials including sponge and silicone.
Gone are those days. Now, Khidhir sees himself on a historical mission to “document the calamity” of his Yazidi community at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
The 31-year-old painter – who goes by the alias Ammar al-Rasam, Arabic for Ammar the painter – paints from early evening to dawn in the city of Duhok, located in Iraq’s Kurdish region. He is now working on his ninth painting depicting ISIL’s gruesome mass killing last June of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers based in the Speicher military camp near Tikrit in central Iraq. In this painting, the Tigris River’s water is reddened with blood.
His paintings are rich with details of the disaster that befell the Yazidi community and Iraqis at large amid ISIL’s rampage. One work shows a slave market in Mosul’s Grand Mosque, where Yazidi women and girls are being sold, some half-naked. In one corner, a chained Yazidi women has red eyes, symbolising that she has shed tears of blood over her miserable fate.
The mosque depicted in this painting, which took more than a month to complete, is the same location where ISIL’s self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered a speech in June to declare the establishment of the group’s caliphate.
Qaso Abdo, a Sinjar resident who had many family members captured by ISIL, feels strongly about Khidhir’s paintings. While his father, two brothers and an uncle were released earlier this year, his niece and her six children remain in captivity.
“The paintings bring the truth before my eyes. This is what happened to us, to my relatives,” Abdo told Al Jazeera. “His works are a message to the world about what we have gone through.”
Khidhir has started advertising his work on social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, where some scenes, such as the slavery market in the grand mosque, have not sat well with everyone.
“I’ve been criticised and threatened by some people, even death threats… They say, ‘You have insulted the mosque’,” Khidhir said. “I say to [them], ‘Why are you so angry because of the painting of a place? Why aren’t you furious over the violation of those women’s dignity and honour?… Why don’t you go out and criticise the atrocities instead of the paintings of the atrocities?’”
Others are quick to praise his work. Arkan Najman, a high school teacher in the nearby town of Shekhan, gets emotional when he speaks of Khidhir’s paintings.
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