Anti-ISIS Musicians give Cause for Hope

He sat and played next to a burned house while the house's owners looked on, smiling despite their misfortune.

Meanwhile on the main street in Adhamiya, which connects the two sides of the city, a bus full of volunteers had arrived. The young men and women who disembarked were all dressed alike and locals were surprised when the group began cleaning up the damage on the streets.

Relax, one of the young men told some curious neighbours, we volunteer every day to clean up bomb sites.

These kinds of campaigns and this kind of activism has become increasingly common over the past few months and the work of volunteers like this has had a big impact. Some of the campaigners, who are mostly younger iraqis, want to encourage peaceful coexistence but the majority, such as the Ansam Bloggers' Network, are focussed on helping other Iraqis in need.

“Our campaign had no other aim except to emphasise what we all have in common, our love of life and our rejection of extremism,” says Elaf Mohammed al-Hijazi, a medical doctor and member of the volunteers in Adhamiya, who is actually partially responsible for starting this particular campaign.

Al-Hijazi is one of the founders of the almost-two-year-old group, Iraqi Builders, who put out calls for volunteer action over Facebook and who do things like help people re-build their damaged homes.

Most of their members are university graduates and include dentists, pilots and engineers, all of whom have volunteered for projects like this one as well as collected money on the streets for those Iraqis less fortunate than themselves.

“The tools for this campaign were funded by a charity market we organised,” Mohammed notes.

“I think that the people here were happy to see us helping,” one of the volunteers, Huda al-Farati, who is also a doctor - a specialist in inherited blood disease - told NIQASH.

“We believe that this kind of work strengthens the relationships between different Iraqi communities. None of the other volunteers know the ethnic or sectarian affiliations of any of the others. The only thing that brings us all together is Iraq. We know that we cannot exist without Iraq existing and we know that nothing can ever help us if we lose our homeland.”

(Hope image via Shutterstock)