Sally Hayden

And I actually traveled to Iraq on, I think I arrived on Valentine's Day in 2024.

And I

I yeah it was quite interesting again going around particularly that chapter focuses on weddings and I wanted to look at kind of the history of this city but through weddings and how the various you know the American invasion for example sanctions how the various kind of stages affected weddings in the city and the story that I ended up focusing on was when ISIS were in control

I met a couple called Marwa and Saif, and they basically... So people, I don't know how much they know about the situation under ISIS, but what happened was they obviously took over the city, but a lot of civilians stayed, which I think is maybe not always understood.

So a lot of people fled, but then some people were like, well...

You know, we don't want to leave our homes.

If we leave our home, it's going to be commandeered and we'll lose our property.

And like a lot of people, they had been through kind of so much different changes and who was in control and all of this that they were like, let's just keep our heads down and wait for this to end.

Like everyone pretty much that I spoke to who wasn't involved in ISIS was like, we just assumed it's like a phase almost and it's going to pass.

And so ISIS took over.

Marwan and SAFE basically fell in love in this period through phone calls.

So ISIS basically was stopping people from using the phone.

If you had a phone and you were caught using it, they could consider you that you were a spy.

Maybe you were like sending out information about them.

And also like getting phone connection was hard.

But Marwan and SAFE were having phone calls on their roofs because that was the only place they could get connection.

And in the middle of the night, and they basically said,

Yeah, they said these long phone calls, that was kind of how they fell in love.

And then they ended up getting married.

And at the time, music was forbidden.