A short interview with Ali Bakht Al Tamimi, founder of a human development organisation based in Baghdad, Iraq. The project explores the different definitions of minorities as well as the possible solutions to the discrimination they face. The concept relies on a balance between four key pillars, individuality, affiliation, citizenship and global identity.

(Work in progress)

The city of Basra is the capital of the Basra province in Southern Iraq. Bordering Iran (east) and Kuwait (south), Its landscape varies from an oil and gas rich desert to fertile lands, home to the famous date palms. Basra is the only Iraqi region with ports to the Arabian/Persian Gulf, making it commercially active. In the absence of Saddam’s strict Baath regime of 2003, many families from surrounding areas have and still are migrating to Basra in hope of finding work.

If home were a body, what would yours look like? Born to a Jamaican mother and Nigerian father, Lola Oseni’s poem ‘Dami-Lola’ looks at what it feels like to be displaced in the place you’ve grown up calling home. Filmed and edited by Yassin Yassin and Jordan Katz-Kaye, ‘Dami-Lola’ reimagines what it means to be home.

The project was part of my effort to understand what had become of the country I'd left behind. Meet the Popular Mobilisation Forces (The Hash Al Shaabi) who fought IS in Iraq. These armed groups fought alongside the official security forces of Iraq when they were mobilised in 2014, a time when the Iraqi military proved to be weak and lost two major cities within the space of a couple of days to IS. The majority of the soldiers in these groups are Iraqi civilians with minimal arms training.