Culture overcomes barbarity

The attack took place during peak hours on a shopping street in the upscale Mansour district of western Baghdad on Tuesday.

Once emergency staff had tended to the dead and wounded, Karim Wasfi, a former chief principal conductor and director for the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, stepped into the blast centre.

Mr Wasfi took out his cello and began playing, grinding commerce to a halt as a large crowd gathered around him.

Witnesses described Mr Wasfi's music not as a song of mourning, but as a 'smoldering, fiery fugue that sent a clear message to the ether that Baghdad still stands strong, and that the human spirit is insurmountable and will never yield to terror or evil.'

A person in the audience filmed the performance, and it has since gone viral on local social media, even gaining praise from the former Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq.

Ex-deputy PM Baraham Salih posted a picture of Mr Wasfi performing on his Twitter account, captioned: 'melody of life survives bigotry & death'

'Obviously, I cannot challenge the bombs with my cello,' Mr Wasfi, currently leading the Karim Wasfi Center for Music & Creativity, told the BBC World Service after his performance.  

'When things are abnormal and so insane, we have an obligation to making to be dedicated to making life sustained.'

The attack took place on Tuesday, when a car packed with explosives blew up, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than two dozen, police and medical sources said.

'The blast targeted a busy commercial street at the peak of rush of shoppers,' said one police captain who attended the blast scene.

'Dozens of parked vehicles were set on fire and black smoke is covering the area'. 

Baghdad has been struck by a series of bombings in the past few days, with several attacks on Wednesday, killing at least eight people. 

Police said the deadliest of Wednesday's attacks took place in Baghdad's western neighborhood of Amiriyah, where a bomb exploded in a commercial area, killing three civilians and wounding 12.

Another bomb struck a convoy of Shiite militiamen in the capital's northern Shula neighborhood, killing two fighters and wounding four. Shiite militias have grown influential recently in the fight against Islamic State militants.

Police said separate bombings killed three more civilians and wounded 20 in markets in the northern Shaab neighborhood and the eastern suburb of Husseiniyah. 

Iraqi authorities have lifted a decade-old night-time curfew on Baghdad in February, seeking to restore a sense of normality to the capital and show it was no longer threatened by Islamic State militants who overran a third of the country last summer.

But the explosions appear to have increased in frequency, and an interior ministry official said Islamic State militants were striking back after losing the city of Tikrit early this month.

(dailymail.co.uk)