The martyrs of Hashd al-Sha’abi

Sadly the dehumanization of the Iraqis, and to a broader extent the Arab and Muslim world as a whole, has reached a stage in which most people really don’t care.

I can quite honestly say that if a car bomb goes off and kills 10, 20 or over 100 Iraqi civilians tomorrow, it will get far less attention than if an A-list celebrity in the West gets a new wacky tattoo or hairdo.

The life of Iraqis has become so cheap that it's now worth less than their own piffling dinar currency, as of today, worth only a fraction of a US cent. It’s a mainstream industry practice to peddle the cliché narrative of demonization, of dehumanization, which creates a superiority complex that ‘we’ in the West are always right and we can never be wrong.

Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the Iraq war against Daesh is not just the unimaginable loss of life but the fact that nobody in the West could care less about the Iraqi people's sacrifice or continued suffering in the aftermath of the war.

Today, if Iraqis are lucky, they may get a brief mention on the Western mainstream channels that somewhere in Iraq a bomb went off killing some random Arab people. Even then, those reports are either met with at best a short-lived vague curiosity or at worst a yawn; for death in Middle Eastern countries has become entirely normalized and in some ways justified in the West.

The mainstream media has taught its audience that dead Arabs are no more unusual than cats catching mice, and this is a crime which "we," the West, are collectively guilty of; allowing the horror and outrage initially felt by the suffering of innocent Iraqis or any other unmentioned oppressed Middle Eastern peoples to become the new norm.

Iraqis have sacrificed and continue to do so. It’s this offering which makes the world a safer place, free from the threat of Takfiri terrorism. Isn't it time we, at the very least, made an effort to recognize this selfless sacrifice of the heroic people of Iraq and the region?

I didn't know these men in life, nor all of their names in death, there were just too many to ask about, but none the less the sight of these fallen Iraqi fighters troubled me more than the thirty plus degree heat I had to endure.