by Betsy Ross
Thursday, Apr. 29, 2004 at 6:05 AM
In the photo, Iraqi university students raise the Iraqi flag over their campus in the northern city of Mosul April 28, 2004 while demonstrating against the U.S. occupation forces attempting to introduce a new flag for the country. The unelected and U.S. hand picked Iraqi Governing Council adopted a new national flag (see inset) which consists of a pale blue crescent on a white background and has a yellow strip between two lines of blue at the bottom. Also in the photo, the Iraqi university students look up at their massive flag draped over a campus building. Critics of the new flag say it places Iraq outside of the Arab world... since all Arab flags use a combination of the colors red, green, black, and white. It has also been noted that the U.S. occupation imposed flag bares a striking simularity to the Israeli flag. The photo also shows Iraqi civilians burning the newly imposed occupation sanctioned flag (Reuters photos, Namir Noor-Eldeen)
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Students stage protest against new Iraqi flag in Mosul
Wed Apr 28, 2004
MOSUL, Iraq (AFP) - Students in this northern Iraqi city took to the streets to protest the new Iraqi flag, shouting slogans slamming the United States and the US-appointed Iraqi interim Governing Council.
More than 1,000 demonstrators gathered around a giant 32-meter-long copy of the old flag at Mosul University and shouted "We will not sell our flag."
The new flag, which was being publicly unveiled Wednesday, is made up of two blue stripes representing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers separated by a yellow stripe symbolizing Iraq's Kurdish minority. The stripes are topped by a white space featuring an Islamic crescent in the middle.
Many Iraqis have strongly criticized it, complaining that it does not sufficiently represent Iraqi civilization and its Arab majority, gives too much importance to the Kurdish minority, and that its pale blue color makes it look like Israel's flag.
They are furious that the new flag will no longer feature the colors red (for nationalism), white (for peace), and black and green (for Islam), nor the three stars which they viewed as symbolizing Iraq's modern history.
