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A New Role for Iraqi Militants: Patrons of the Arts

This week in Baghdad, the city once terrorized by those killings, Sheik Mazin mingled in a white-walled art gallery as the patron of an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that would not, exactly, be out of place in Chelsea or SoHo: abstract art, expressionist paintings and conceptual works larded with symbols of Iraq’s ancient history and today’s reality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/world/middleeast/14baghdad.html?_r=1&hp

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