Iraqi writer Zuhairi uses poetry to read Iraq's political landscape

Iraqi writer Sabah al-Zuhairi has drawn on two lines of his own narrow poetry to interpret the country's political and social conditions, arguing that long experience with war, sanctions, sectarian conflict, ISIS attacks and entrenched corruption has made the Iraqi public difficult to deceive. In his reading, the first line refers to a person who has built up immunity to the bites of large, poisonous "Arabid" snakes and can no longer be fooled by the smaller, poisonous "hayye." Zuhairi uses the image to suggest that Iraqis, shaped by years of heavy crises, can readily identify political manipulation. The second line uses the term "teshellebe," which describes rising a step by stepping on others' shoulders. According to the writer, the concept captures segments of the post-2003 era who reached positions of power or access to public resources without any political background, trading moral values for the goal of staying in power. The piece underscores what Zuhairi describes as a heightened public awareness and resistance to political rhetoric built through those accumulated experiences.