Video Diary- Hometown Baghdad

Bullets... Bullets... Fear... Death... Bullets... Bullets... One young Iraqi went as far as describing the nightly gun battles outside his home as a "Symphony of Bullets". He said this during one of the daily electrical blackouts he, and his family, face every three hours. Another Iraqi youth gave a tour of his college campus, which had recently been hit by a rocket, and took the time to point out where a fellow classmate had recently had his brains removed from his skull. The same young man his later seen eating dinner with his family. Simple enough, right? No. The salad, which his mother has prepared for him, his siblings, and their father, is considered "forbidden", or illegal by the Islam extremists prowling their hometown. The young man comments that just by a particular salad with his family "I am considered an infidel". Do you know this place? You should. This is the place we have grown to know very well over the last four years. Although you may not recognize it, due to the lack of political aspects and lies we have grown to associate it with, this is the city of Baghdad, Iraq. The latter statements are taken from the internet documentary entitled Hometown Baghdad.

Hometown Baghdad is a video diary production set up by Chat The Planet and a group of young Iraqi citizens in an effort to bring a first hand view of the Iraq War to the western public. The experiment equips these young Iraqis with video cameras and encourages them to document their day to day routines as they cope with life in their war torn homeland. Moving and thought provoking, these video blogs show Americans and other western citizens a side of the insurgent conflict that the national media has not attempted to present to us. Dinner with family, attending a university, and visiting friends are all subjects that have been documented by the production. These actions may seem average and like those we all embark on throughout our daily routines but for the Iraqi people these procedures come at a high price. That price is the fear for their lives.

Watching these videos it is not easy to imagine yourself, or someone you know, living with such insecure circumstances. Comparing American crime to that of Iraq’s is a truly ignorant association. Gangs and thugs in America do not carry rocket launchers nor do they detonate a bomb attached to themselves near crowded areas throughout town. The majority of young American children are not faced with the probability of watching a man die, in the middle of the street, from a firing squad of insurgents as they return home from their school. Parents do not wave their children off to school with the fear of their being caught in the middle of a gun fight as they attend their daily recess. College students in America do not fear the possibility of abduction and torture due to their education. Although in some parts of the United States these occurances do transpire on a lesser degree, they are not so casual or daily as they are in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq.

If you have not yet seen these videos, I highly encourage you to see them. They are very moving and offer a different side to the war in Iraq. http://hometownbaghdad.com