Paranoia and resistance in Baghdad

I got into a taxi a couple of days ago and the first thing out of the car speakers was:

"The men of Falluja are all as brave as wolves./They hit in the darkest nights with great precision./The sun of freedom will never set down on them./They fight in the name of Allah, followed by a big army."

It was in Arabic verse, so it rhymes better than my loose translation. It went on and on, praising the bravery of the so-called resistance. The driver was playing it really loud, as if to make sure everybody in the neighbourhood was aware of his peculiar musical tastes.

It wasn't exactly sung, it was done in the way eulogisers sing. We call them maddahs and they are usually accompanied by an instrument that looks like a huge tambourine without the cymbals but with little chains on the inside that rattle as you hit it.

So this maddah was shouting from the taxi I was in - shouting things that would fall directly under Mullah Bremer's fatwa about inflammatory verbal attacks on the coalition, ie, Mr Taxi Driver should be in jail, and I am in there contemplating the effects jumping out of the car might have on my ribs.

...The best place to visit when looking for iffy merchandise is the looters' market at Bab al-Sharji. You used to go there and find stuff spread out on a blanket, most of it stolen. And the vendor doesn't know what most of it is used for anyway.

After the war and all the looting, the blankets became stalls and you would find there everything from unused computers to used batteries - don't ask me who would buy those. The most interesting development was the stalls that sell bootleg movies. Porn sits beside religious sermons. At every stall is a small television and you can preview your chosen DVD. It is always fun to walk past the stalls and listen to the audio collage, but this time all the stalls were playing the same thing - the scary disc I heard in the taxi. On each stall, people crowded around watching that thing. It was selling like the hot bread of Bab al-Agha.

...The cover of the DVD only has American Army written on it and, surprisingly enough, once you start it, it gives you the name and address of the maddah and the production team, which means they either have bat shit for brains or they just don't care and have bat shit for brains.  article

Or...

But that's a conspiracy theory.