arabic

Well, I guess this is one example of progress, or something: the newly-redesigned (again) Iraqi flag is finally being flown in the northern Kurdish region. The new flag has removed the three stars, which represented Iraq’s hope (decades ago) eventually to join Egypt and Syria in a United Arab Republic (whence the two stars that are still on Syria’s flag). It also features Kufic script to write ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great), a neutral replacement for Saddam Hussein’s own handwriting.

Say what you will about the new Iraqi flag; it’s a damn sight better than the awful proposed white-and-blue striped flag, designed by the Iraqi Governing Council (remember, the government set up during the U.S. occupation?) which looked eerily similar to the flag of Israel. If I remember correctly, people didn’t know that the two blue stripes were supposed to represent the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, or that the gold stripe was somehow standing for the Kurds, or that a flag with no black or green or red was supposed to be an Arab flag.

Nota bene: the two blue stripes on Israel’s flag do not represent the ‘Zionist dream’ of a Jewish homeland ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’. The stripes are modelled after the tallit, the traditional Jewish prayer shawl. Although, I suppose, if the proposed Iraqi flag had gone through, at least one blue stripe on some flag somewhere would have represented the Euphrates River…sigh.