Sabah says he found the Facebook campaign by accident but that it gave him and his friends hope that maybe they could survive the terror attacks and criminal gangs that operate in Iraq. And he really likes the politics planned for “buffer zone” city-within-a-city. Or rather, the lack of politics.
“In this zone, we won’t use any religious, tribal or other titles,” Sabah explains. “A mosque would be built for Muslims but there will also be a church next door and there will be room for everyone to worship.”
And although it may seem like it’s mostly a publicity stunt that highlights the troubling situation in Iraq, the campaign’s organizers are not actually kidding about their buffer zone.
One of the organisers, Rami Hashim, said that they would promote the idea first, then they would begin collecting people’s signatures around the country. “We will also make a list of all those who want to live in this buffer zone,” Hashim says. “And when we get enough signatures we will go to the UN and ask that they help us build our mini Iraq.”
The city could be self funding, in the same way that the semi-autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan is, and it could also receive a special allocation of funds from the Iraqi government, Hashim suggests optimistically.
“We want to build a miniature city surrounded by concrete barriers and protected by foreign military,” says one of the organizers, Mustafa al-Azzawi. “In this city, engineers will be responsible for construction, doctors for health, lawyers for law and so on. We want to build our city with technocrats, and not in the way the current government is building the country. Right now a lot of unqualified people are running this country.”
Local sociologist Izzat Siham al-Qaysi says that it’s a sign that Iraq’s young people have completely lost faith in their political system. “It’s the result of years of deterioration in security and in the economy and it’s about the government’s inability to make any kind of significant progress, at any level,” al-Qaysi suggested.
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