Last week on Boing Boing, I blogged about Jake Appelbaum (vanity site link, blog link), a San Francisco resident and self-identified "geek" who is traveling in Iraq and blogging what he encounters there. He's certainly keeping busy — he's nerdevangelizing in Arbil today, teaching locals how to use Debian GNU/Linux. "The strangest thing about training Iraqis is that they take smoke/pray breaks,": Jake IMmed a few minutes ago, "The secular smoke, the faithful pray."
Image above: cartoon icons including Mickey Mouse have been appropriated into these wall murals. "Disney can eat their heart out," says Jake, "I would love to see someone enforce their copyright on the mouse here. We might just get to see someone supporting copyrights against a wall."
Jake just uploaded a bunch of new stuff to the blog. Here are torrents of video interviews with two of the Iraqi people he met in Arbil: interview with Salim (screengrab image below), and interview with Marwan.
Jake says, "The rest of the journal has been updated with everything from more Yezidi photos to a war-torn building with something like children's graffiti depicting battles: Link.
Below, graffitti on a wall about two hours by car from Arbil. Any Boing Boing fans care to translate? It reminds me a little of Guernica.
Previously: HOWTO set up a VSAT in Iraq, and More from Jake, a geek traveling in Iraq.
Reader comment: Boing Boing reader Samir M. Nassar says:
The writing on the wall is not Arabic, except for the word 'Jihad' which is the word topmost in the image containing the car and machine gun. I can make out 'Mujahideh' or what looks like it'd say 'mojahideh' if I was reading it in Arabic. Either way it comes from the root 'mujahid' which is the singular, masculine noun for 'partakes in jihad', so I am guessing that 'mojahideh' means 'mujahideen' in Arabic. I have Kurdish friends under Turkish occupation and they usually write with Latin characters. Interesting to see Kurdish using Arabic characters.
Jake replies:
Lots of Kurds write in Arabic, it's very common actually. The Kurds will write in a different script depending on which country you find them in. In Iraq, it's arabic script, in turkey it's latin script and in Iran it's arabic script.
Reader Jeff Scott Tynes says:
My wife, an Arab with native Arabic, says that the language on that bit of graffiti is likely not Arabic, at least not that she can read. She believes it's Kurdish. The Kurds use Arabic script, much like the Iranians, for their language, but the language is not the same — about as much akin as French to English; same letters, different language. So you're likely looking for those with Kurdish language abilities, not Arabic.
Update: Some people are asking for video transcripts. Jake says, "If someone would like to transcribe these, just email me and I'll post them."
