jcourt

It happened in the spring, at the time when kings go out to war, that Saddam Hussein carried out one of his most sinister experiments on the Kurdish population of Halabja. It was March 16, 1988, when the people of Halabja began their day to a barrage of bombs raining down from the sky — chemical cocktails engineered to inflict maximize damage on the civilian population. But the Butcher remained in Baghdad, safely six hours away.

In many ways Halabja Day is the day the Preemptive Love Coalition began. Born as an organization in 2008, our raison d'être began twenty years prior, the chemical capstone to the genocidal campaign against the Iraqi portion of the stateless, scattered Kurdish population.   Read more...

The Preemptive Love Coalition began with a little girl in Iraq dying of a congenital heart disease. In the early summer months of 2007, I sat in the Palace Hotel in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, with a man and his little girl. The meeting had been arranged by a tea-maker I had befriended in the hotel when he learned that I had contacts who might help get this little girl out of the country for the life-saving heart surgery she had been waiting on her entire life.   Read more...

In the Spring of 2007, I was invited to a local hotel in Iraq where some Iranian musician-friends were relaxing after a big concert they had just given. I was asked to bring my guitar and a nice meet-and-greet erupted into a Western-gospel-folk-meets-Iranian-folk-orchestra explosion in the lobby of the hotel. While belting out Eastern versions of Western standards, I took note of the Iranian tar player's shoes - a white pair of hand-knit works of art that screamed "Persian rock star." The band took me to buy my own pair of these famous shoes the very next day. And thus began my fascination with the klash.   Read more...