Let me tell you what broke my heart. One of the young men, Saif, in the second video, just graduated from college as a Dentist. Yet he states he would be willing to work at a gas station anywhere else in the world than stay in Baghdad. These are short video's 2-3 minutes in length. I urge everyone to watch them. It shows how these kids are really no different than our own young people..the same wants and desires out of life. They even have created their own band, which made me smile inspite of their pain and suffering. The difference is the "symphony of bullets" and death that they live with daily. The video below is one of the series, just to pique your interest.
The following is Salon's brief description of the set of videos:
What we immediately found absorbing in "Hometown Baghdad" is not the fear, confusion or carnage we've grown to expect from documentary reports out of Iraq. It's the three men central to this series -- Adel, Ausama and Saif -- whose lives we see unfold in short, telling vignettes. We see them eat dinner and go to school, watch them go swimming and practice in their rock band. But in a war-torn, religiously divided city, even these simple actions are fraught.
On the fourth anniversary of our invasion of Iraq, when many of us have become hopelessly inured to reports of yet another bombing, the simple struggles of regular people take on a greater, more chilling power; we watch a way of life deteriorate before our eyes, and come to recognize the horrors of war in a way that the bold headlines or CNN news alerts no longer convey. We think you'll find them compelling and thought-provoking, and hope you'll write in to the Letters section to tell us what you think.
