In Iraq, to Be a Hairstylist Is to Risk Death

[RedEarth]

In Iraq, to Be a Hairstylist Is to Risk Death
By Monte Morin
Times Staff Writer

February 22, 2005

BAGHDAD — A bomb rips through a women's hair salon, shattering wall-length mirrors and shredding posters of coiffures. In another neighborhood, gunmen fire wildly into a busy barbershop, killing the owner and three teenage boys waiting for haircuts.

At yet another shop, a masked visitor presses a note into the palm of a horrified haircutter. The message: "Our swords are thriving for the neck of barbers."

Iraq's insurgency has long targeted local police, government leaders and national guardsmen as a means of destabilizing the nascent democracy, but now guerrillas have taken aim at a far more unlikely line of work.

In what some describe as a Taliban-like effort to impose a militant Islamic aesthetic, extremists have been warning Iraqi barbers not to violate strict Islamic teachings by trimming or removing men's beards. Giving Western-style haircuts or removing hair in an "effeminate" manner, they say, are crimes punishable by death.

"They went to all the barbers," said one threatened hairstylist, Ali Mahmood, 28. "They told them not to shave beards. They told them no sideburns. No American styles. They told them none of this or they would die."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-barbers22feb22,0,773012,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[NYC]

1. I wonder if those people will ever again live in peace.

[madrchsod]

3. not for a long,long time

iraqi will return to a third world country and will take years to regain what it had under saddam.

[Warpy]

4. They'd have been marched to the lunatic fringe

and unversally despised were they not also fighting a foreign occupation.

People don't vote for their own oppression unless they're in danger.

Why do you think so many people stupidly voted for Bush? They were convinced they were in danger in rural USA from mad Islamic bombers taking out the local Grange hall. That's why there were weekly terror alerts before the election.

If there's a Taliban takeover of Iraq, we can blame Bush for it.

They will.

[NYC]

5. Re: "They will."

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."
Samuel P. Huntington

[HockeyMom]

9. Amazing

As a New Yorker, never ceases to amaze me, how TERRIFIED people in places one can't find on a map, are so TERRIFIED of being attacked. "The ONLY thing you have to fear, is FEAR ITSELF". THAT is why the place where 9/11 actually HAPPENED, gave Bush 20% of the vote. WAKE UP, AMERICA.

[Alpharetta]

2. So now the "coalition troops" can shoot anyone with facial hair

because clearly if you don't shave, you're on the side of the terrorists...

[THUNDER HANDS]

6. Saddam and his mustache don't look so bad now, huh?

Believe me, Iraq was no picnic, but it was 10,000X better than Afghanistan, which is what that country is sliding towards now.

[fortyfeetunder]

7. Deja vu Afghanistan

I recall reading an article several years ago about an underground hair styling salon in Afghanistan. Of course, the women wanted to look stylish and feminine, but this was the only place they could get away with it and not raise the riles of the Taliban. Looks like deja vu all over again.

[Davis_X_Machina]

8. Is this...

...the 'peeance' part or the 'freeance' part?