Please slow freedom
by Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR

© Yuri KOZYREV / NOOR

From October 8^th to November 4^th

The purpose of the war in Iraq was eliminating Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, but it turns out he didn’t have any. Oops.
When you decide to occupy another country, be aware that you are opening Pandora’s Box. 15 years on, Iraqi people and the world are still suffering the consequences of the US-led invasion. The Americans made many colossal errors in Iraq. The first was to completely disempower the Sunnis in Iraq after the American invasion, in 2003, with the result that many Iraqi Army officers, with nothing to gain in a Shia-dominated Iraq, joined isis. The U.S. military detained tens of thousands of Iraqis at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, where imprisoned jihadis were able to radicalize new recruits in plain sight and also plan future operations and attacks.
The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq caused a “blowback,” with untold thousands of terrorists, many willing to blow themselves to pieces in a vengeful cause. Trying to impose the United States’ will on Iraq (and now Syria) took a deadly toll, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, destroying much of modern and ancient Iraq, sending into exile millions of refugees—and created ISIS. There would be no ISIS if Americans hadn’t invaded Iraq. West had also failed to react in a significant way to the violence that started in Syria following the 2011 Arab Spring and the complete breakdown of order in Libya following Nato’s intervention in the same year. Isis rose out of the disorder in Iraq and the vacuum in Syria.
Five hundred thousand Syrians have died since the civil war began, in 2011; millions have been displaced, and approximately a million refugees have landed in Europe. The removal of Saddam Hussein and the toppling of a whole succession of other Arab dictators in 2011 were closely connected — a fact that has been overlooked largely because of the hostility that the Iraq war engendered.
The Arab Spring Started in Iraq.
The war in Iraq had a bright side. It created the Arab Spring.

Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR

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Outside in Bayeux
The layout of the exhibition can be found in details at the Tourism Office.

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This exhibition was created in association with Nikon