Communist Party festival to open Friday in Baghdad with art, journalism, and cultural events

BAGHDAD — The annual “Tariq Al-Shaab” festival, organized by the Iraqi Communist Party’s official newspaper, will begin Friday and continue through Saturday at Abu Nuwas Gardens in Baghdad.

Organizers said the event will feature academic, artistic, and literary figures and include panel discussions on journalism, media production, and cultural issues. It will also host art exhibitions, book and photo displays, and theatrical and musical performances.

Tariq Al-Shaab (“Path of the People”) is the Arabic-language daily newspaper of the Iraqi Communist Party and one of Iraq’s oldest publications.

This year’s festival commemorates the late sociologist Faleh Abdul-Jabbar, one of the newspaper’s first editors. Born in Baghdad in 1946, he became a leading political sociologist and died in Beirut in 2018.

Ali Sahib, one of the organizers, told 964media, “The festival is a space for intellectual, political, cultural discussion, and open artistic activity.”

The event is being held in cooperation with government institutions including the Ministry of Culture, which will present several of its publications, and the Ministry of Industry, which will showcase locally produced goods.

Three honorary awards will be presented during the festival: the Shumran Al-Yasiri Award for the best opinion column, named after the prominent Iraqi columnist; the Hadi Al-Mahdi Award for freedom of expression, honoring the journalist and filmmaker killed in 2011; and the Kamel Shiaa Award for enlightenment, commemorating the Iraqi writer and intellectual assassinated in 2008.

The awards are administered by the festival’s organizing committee.