Lamia Al-Gailani Werr, who as one of the Iraq’s first female archaeologists helped her country’s national museum recover from the looting of its antiquities at the outset of the Iraq war, died on Jan. 18 in Amman, Jordan. She was 80. Her daughter Noorah Al-Gailani said the cause was a stroke. Dr. Gailani had been in Amman attending a workshop that trains curators to help pro
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Part of what remains of the ceremonial entrance through the walls of the ancient city of Babylon. The site was partly reconstructed in the 1950s and 1990s, but in a way that caused damage. Conservationists now are trying to undo some of that damage. Jane Arraf/NPR Mohaned Ahmed is standing on scaffolding at the ancient site of Babylon, dipping water into a bucket and spongi
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Since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the name of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Grand Shiʿi cleric, has come to prominence. Sistani emerged as a key player in the processes that constituted and sustained the post-2003 Iraqi political order, as manifested in key events such as the writing of constitution or the mobilization against the Islamic State (I.S.). Neverthel
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On Facebook and in the cafés of decimated Mosul, they envision a country free from political Islam. Do they have a shot? Iraqi students walk near a building of the central Library of the University of Mosul, in Mosul, Iraq May 14, 2018. KHALID AL-MOUSILY / REUTERS MOSUL, Iraq—Rayyan Hadidi was 18 years old when he lost his faith. It was July 2006, and he wa
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This article is part of a collection of tributes to the late Faleh A. Jabar. It was first published in Banipal 61, A Journey in Iraqi Fiction in Spring 2018. I first met Faleh in the early 1990s, introduced and highly recommended by my friends Peter and Marion Sluglett, prominent Iraq scholars, with a view to starting a PhD at Birkbeck. I took an immediate liking to Faleh,
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