Things I Did Not Know About Baghdad
So, I was looking at a picture of my cousin, taken during his last stint in Iraq, and saw something in the background. It looked like an enormous sword. Doing a quick google search, I discovered it was an enormous sword. What had never occurred to me was this: Iraq has remarkable monuments, and having recently been ruled by a megalomaniacal dictator, some of those monuments are contemporary. Called 'Hands of Victory' in English, this is a monument constructed at the close of the Iran-Iraq War (also known as the First Gulf War, 1980-88), which ended in stalemate between the two nations, although each claimed victory.
The war started off as a border dispute when Iraq invaded Iran, and had tremendous fatalities due to the WWI-style trench warfare + old-school chemical warfare used.
According to one source, the monument's hand's are modeled after Saddam Hussien's hands. The monument itself is supposedly cast from the melted-down weapons of deceased Iraqi soldiers (? Seems questionable that they'd melt down functional weaponry, but I'm not sure how important stringent symbolism is to the Iraqi people), and on either side of the monument are nets of the helmets collected from Iranian captives during the war (see picture below - how alarmingly Aztecian of them!).
The war started off as a border dispute when Iraq invaded Iran, and had tremendous fatalities due to the WWI-style trench warfare + old-school chemical warfare used.
According to one source, the monument's hand's are modeled after Saddam Hussien's hands. The monument itself is supposedly cast from the melted-down weapons of deceased Iraqi soldiers (? Seems questionable that they'd melt down functional weaponry, but I'm not sure how important stringent symbolism is to the Iraqi people), and on either side of the monument are nets of the helmets collected from Iranian captives during the war (see picture below - how alarmingly Aztecian of them!).