Baghdad - On Friday night at Baghdad's National Theatre, Ahmed Faruq, one of Iraq's most promising new rappers, stood before a crowd of hundreds of young men and wept as he remembered the night his father disappeared. "From that day, wounds found in me a place to stay; grief became the main entity of my identity; how can I find peace of mind?" he cried over a hip-hop beat.
Ahmed Faruq was 19 when his father left his home in Baghdad four years ago. He hasn't heard from him since.
In 2005 people were disappearing from the streets of Baghdad all the time. Sometimes they would be found in a ditch months later.
"My eyes filled with tears when I performed the song," he told the German Press Agency dpa. "I even forgot a line because I was so choked-up."
"I love my father very much," he said. "This song is an expression of my devotion to my father, although it doesn't represent all my feelings and love for him, since we were left without any knowledge of his fate."
"My brother and his wife and some of my relatives came to the concert, and the fact they were there among the hundreds of other people was a huge motivation to do my best to make this concert succeed."
When the US-led military invaded Iraq in 2003, the soldiers brought compact discs. Almost overnight, young Iraqis, isolated from the world for years under Saddam Hussein, got access to the internet and to the world. Pirated albums, burned from the web, filled the stores.
As others had before them in cities and suburbs around the world, many young Iraqis found something in hip-hop music, art, poetry and dress that spoke to them. Today, on the streets and school hallways of Baghdad, Irbil and Sulimaniya, they are giving birth to a burgeoning hip-hop scene.
New York City's South "boogie-down" Bronx could be a violent place in the early 1980s, when hip-hop was born. Armed police nervously patrolled the streets from their cars. There were 1,818 murders in New York City in 1980, when the population was roughly the size of Baghdad's today. By 1990, at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, that number had risen to 2,605. By comparison, Baghdad reported 2,300 murders in 2008.
For two hours on Friday, the biggest stage in Iraq throbbed with the heavy bass riffs of three rising Baghdad emcees. Their songs - some patriotic, some romantic, some just funny - spoke to the new Iraqi reality.
The three met in Damascus a year ago and decided to form a hip-hop group. They returned to Baghdad and started practicing for shows.
"I think that after this concert, rap will have a large popular base in Iraq," Faruq said after the show. "We plan to give more concerts and put out an album. We are not afraid of violence, and we have the courage to stick with this art."
"Today we performed some beautiful songs that were inspired by the Iraqi reality. We distanced ourselves from sectarianism and violence and turned with optimism to the future, with joy and love.
"We talked about Iraqis being like fingers of one hand, and Iraqi youth living like their peers around the world. We performed some light-hearted, funny songs to make the crowd happy and did another one about rap as an artistic trend around the world."
Concert-goers of all ages found something to speak to them in songs like "Etched," "My Love," "The Voice of Disaster" and "Justice in Rap."
"The concert was really nice," said the mother of Ahmed Namir, another member of the band, who asked to be cited only as "Umm Ahmed."
"I couldn't keep myself from crying when Ahmed (Faruq) rapped about his father," she said.
"This is the first time in my life I have seen a rap show in Iraq," she said. "In the past, I have seen concerts on television by famous foreign bands. The group was a bit scared though, probably by the interplay from the crowd, who really raised their voices in the theatre."
After the show, many young men and women flocked around the band members, offering their congratulations and taking photos with them, using cameras and their mobile phones.
"The concert was great, and I expect these young men to have a great future in rap," one concertgoer, Fadiya, aged 17, raved.
"Today I decided I'll go to any rap concert anywhere in Baghdad so I can enjoy this art," she said. "It is really attuned to the Iraqi reality and has nice lyrics. It's refined and compelling."
