Stories Of Wartime, Transformed Through Music
Tortured and imprisoned under Saddam Hussein's regime, composer and oud player Rahim Alhaj — who resettled as a refugee in New Mexico — uses his work to tell true stories of Iraqis living through war.
by Anastasia Tsioulcas
Jul 10, 2018
3 minutes
Rahim Alhaj is a composer and musician from Baghdad. He was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured for speaking out under Saddam Hussein's regime. Alhaj fled his native country in 1991 — first going to Jordan, then Syria. He says that he heard that the Iraqi secret police intended to murder him abroad. So finally, in 2000, he came to the United States as a refugee, where he was resettled in New Mexico. (It wasn't an easy transition: As a new arrival, he tried to a job at a local McDonald's, saying that
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