‘We are a forgotten people’: how rap music processed trauma in Iraq

The 2003 invasion of Iraq left a small but noticeable impression on US hip-hop. “Stomp, push, shove, mosh, fuck Bush / Until they bring our troops home,” as Eminem rapped on Mosh, and he begged: “No more blood for oil, we got our own battles to fight on our own soil,” alongside a bitingly direct video. “We rebellious … screaming ‘leave Iraq alone!’” Jay-Z rapped in 2003, and a year after the invasion, MF Doom questioned what the point of it all was on the Madvillain track Strange Ways: “All you get is lost children / While the bosses sit up behind the desks, it cost billions / To blast humans in half, into calves and arms / Only one side is allowed to have bombs.”

But the rap scene in Iraq and folk and pop styles – and so these relatively infrequent interjections from US rappers came to dominate the conversation around the war. In the 20 years since, though, rappers in Iraq and its diaspora have voiced their lived experience of the conflict and their reflections on its legacy, often striking a noticeably different tone to how the conflict was documented in western rap.