Inspired by
Iraq: Under Poisoned Skies
The toxic impact of gas flaring on people and the environment in southern Iraq

BBC News and BBC World Service
28 September, 01 October and 10 November 2022

Five years old, lived in Rumaila, Basra, southern Iraq.
Died from cancer caused by gas flaring at nearby oil fields.
She had already lost her older brother to the disease.

Inspired by
Iraq: Under Poisoned Skies
The toxic impact of gas flaring on people and the environment in southern Iraq

BBC News and BBC World Service
28 September, 01 October and 10 November 2022

destroy (dɪˈstrɔɪ) verb:
end the existence of (something) by damaging or attacking it.

change (tʃeɪn(d)ʒ) verb:
an act or process through which something becomes different.

In a demonstration by NHS (National Health Service) staff in London earlier this year, I saw these words on a large horizontal placard carried by a young nurse. I am using her exact words as she drew them in their original colours in full and total solidarity with the nurse’s quest for better pay.

The Conservative ruling class where self regard is much bigger than ability.

Keir Starmer ordered his members of parliament not to join picket lines in solidarity with striking workers.

Getting to the top by lying. Crashing down for lying.
Good riddance to Boris Johnson, the self-serving liar propped up by self-serving conservative toadies and rightwing media.

Women, raise hell. Don’t let Trump take you back 150 years.

In solidarity with women’s rights in America against right-wing Supreme Court judges appointed by Donald Trump.

“Rights are to be taken, not requested; seized, not begged for.”
Cuban national hero José Martí (1853-1895)

Robert F. Worth, Inside the Iraqi Kleptocracy, New York Times, 29 July 2020

Bob Crowley, retired U.S. Army Colonel who served in Afghanistan in 2013 and 2014.

From: The Afghanistan Papers, The Washington Post, 09 December 2019

Daniel Davis, senior fellow for Defense Priorities and former U.S. Army Lt. Colonel who deployed into combat zones four times.

From: The Real Afghanistan Disaster: The War Was Lost Long Ago
19fortyfive.com, 18 August 2021

This poster was designed and published on 31st August 2021, the last day of U.S. and coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan.

This poster was designed and published on 31st August 2021, the last day of U.S. and coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Poet: Robert Minhinnick

Commemorating thirty years since the 1991 Gulf War.
(Four verses in four prints)

Ur was an important Sumerian city-state that dates back to circa 3800 BCE.
It is located about 16 kilometres to the south west of Nasiriyah city in southern Iraq.

Poet: Jo Shapcott

Commemorating thirty years since the 1991 Gulf War.
(Four verses in four prints)

Poet: Robert Minhinnick

Commemorating thirty years since the 1991 Gulf War.
(Four verses in four prints)

Poet: Helen Dunmore

Commemorating thirty years since the 1991 Gulf War.
(Four verses in four prints)

Just before he was murdered in 1975, Pasolini had launched a blistering attack on Italy’s ruling Christian Democrat party. He accused its leaders of “shamefulness, contempt for the citizens, manipulation of public funds, deals with oil companies, with industrialists, with bankers, complicity with the Mafia, treason in the interests of a foreign power (US), destruction of the countryside and urban environment, responsibility for the anthropological degradation of Italians and the corrupt distribution of civic positions to adulators.”

Sounds familiar?

Hommage to the Italian poet, author and film director

Margaret Walker (1915-1998)

* 1619 the year that the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, aboard a Dutch frigate.

The Nation, July 11, 1966

Until white Americans, liberals and conservatives alike, join African Americans, Native Americans, Latinx Americans, Asian Americans, and all people of colour in replacing this white supremacist system with an anti-racist republic, politically and economically, the revolts of African Americans and their allies against the American Republic of White Supremacy will continue for the foreseeable future. 

Joseph Massad
Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, New York

Who really needs to “Stay Alert and Control the Virus”? Is it you and your incompetent government, or the British people who have lost more than thirty three thousand lives and rising?

That’s how reckless, irrational and incompetent Trump described Coronavirus at the outbreak of the pandemic. Since then, a million Americans have fallen ill with the “hoax” and more than 67,000 have died; in just a few weeks surpassing the US death toll in all the years of the Vietnam war.

To all doctors, nurses and medical staff around the world. Your efforts and sacrifices in fighting Covid-19 are highly appreciated.

One of seven posters questioning the American occupation of Iraq

George Monbiot, The Guardian, 10 December 2019

A print inspired by an interview with James Verini, the American author of They Will Have To Die Now: Mosul And The Fall Of The Caliphate.
In answering a question about what he has taken away from being in Mosul, Iraq, he said: “Yet more guilt, and more shame about America’s role in the destruction of Iraq over the last decade and a half. You see the effect of it endlessly and, if you’re not endlessly ashamed, then you ought to be.”
The Observer, 29.9.2019

This print is dedicated to the memory of all innocent people who lost their lives as a result of knife crimes in the UK. Their families and loved ones have been left to endure the pain and torment of their loss.

Italian Jew, chemist, author and Holocaust survivor.
English translation by Ruth Feldman

This poster is dedicated to the Palestinian people whose liberties and equality are denied by the oppressive and racist Israeli regime.

From her novel Home

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, 29 August 2018

Question: Why would any objection to this type of fascist rhetoric, spewed out daily by far right racist Israeli politicians, be judged as anti-Semitic?

Stop the daily criminal practices against Palestinian civilians

Benito Mussolini, Fascist chief, soon after he learned he had been elected member of the Italian Parliament in 1921.
Don’t let anti-democrats win democratic elections.

After seeing Mussolini 2019 calendar on sale in Rome. 

“America shouldn’t be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price. And sometimes that’s also a monetary price.”
Trump to American troops in Iraq, December 26th 2018.

No. Only through oppressive Arab rulers can we guarantee our interests in the region and peace for Israel.

A print design featuring the sales pitch of the former reality-show host and America’s forty-fifth president to rulers of oil sheikhdoms to buy US-made military equipment. The Arabic words at the bottom read:
FOR YOUR DIRTY WARS.

Nearly 4,500 American troops were killed in Iraq. Between 2005 and the end of 2018 the figure of veterans lost to suicide will reach 100,000.
Source: BBC, Newsnight, 25 October 2018.
How many Iraqis were killed and how many will be lost as a result of the American invasion in 2003?

By George W.Bush, 2003 and Donald J.Trump, 2018
Poster design inspired by an American air strike on Syria.

Anat Berko, member of the Likud party in a speech to the Israeli parliament, February 2016.
Israel: 70 years of denying the reality and history of a people.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
Poster design on the 50th anniversary of his assassination.

What an American solider said to a displaced Iraqi civilian at a camp in the buffer zone between Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.

“Exercising their right to bear arms, Americans had accumulated more than 40% of the planet’s small arms; the US arsenal in private hands was larger than that of the next 25 countries combined.”

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew Bacevich, Professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, investigative journalist, writer and anti-corruption activist, Malta.
A poster designed in memory of the brave anti-corruption campaigner who was murdered by a car bomb on October 16th, 2017.

Iraq: Ten Years On (2003-2013)

Iraq: Ten Years On (2003-2013)

The fake bomb detectors ADE651, sold to Iraq at vastly inflated prices by British conman James McCormick, were in use in Iraq long after UK investigators discovered they were worthless. McCormick was jailed for 10 year in 2013. 

Iraq: Ten Years On (2003-2013)

D’ibil al-Khuza’i (d.860)
… and now, before me are many self-serving Iraqi politicians, but Iraq-serving politicians are nowhere to be seen.

Iraq: Ten Years On (2003-2013)