Iraq's New Flag

New on top, old below.

They removed the three Baathist stars and changed the style of the caligraphy. Apparently the old version was based on Saddam Hussein's handwriting.

From the dreaded New York Times:

Members of Parliament voted 110 to 50 for the flag, which was introduced in 2004 and bears the red, white and black stripes of Iraq’s original banner. The design preserves a sense of continuous national identity, while purging the flag of Baathist allusions, supporters say.

Kurdish politicians, many of whom survived the genocidal gas bombings by Hussein forces in the Anfal, or spoils of war, campaign of the 1980s, were among the fiercest critics of the old flag. In 2006, Massoud Barzani, president of the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, refused to fly the flag from government offices, prompting fear of Kurdish separatism.

On Tuesday, however, Kurdish lawmakers pushed for a compromise, dropping their insistence on yellow lettering for the Arabic inscription, for a design without Baathist references.

Zuhair Humadi, a senior adviser to the Shiite-led Iraqi government, said the Kurds sought the deal before an international conference of members of Arab Parliaments in weeks.

“They won’t come if only the Kurdish flag is flying,” Mr. Humadi said of the Arab leaders. “And Barzani wanted that meeting to be in Kurdistan, and he will not allow Saddam Hussein’s flag to be flown. So they agreed to this.” [...]

Several lawmakers said that because the flag had been changed out of Kurdish expediency, they expected it to be changed again.

When I learned my flags as a kid, there were three red-white-black flags with green stars. The one-star flag was North Yemen (the star is now gone, after unification with South Yemen). The two-star flag was and is Syria. And the three-star flag was Iraq (no script back then).

(North Yemen was in a confederation with Syria and Egypt (together the United Arab Republic) when they adopted their flag. They dropped one of the two stars from the UAR flag. When the UAR disolved, Egypt replaced the stars with a golden eagle. There are now four similar red-white-black tricolors: plain (Yemen), eagle (Egypt), script (Iraq), and two stars (Syria).)

How long do you think it will it be before the tv networks change their graphics?

(ht: Tigerhawk)