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Hello and welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service with me

Johnny IANson. We're going back to the formation of a pioneering heavy metal band

in Baghdad, Iraq whose determination to keep playing despite conflict would set them on a collision

cause with a dictatorship, militants and the West. Jet fighters have swooped low over the capital as air raid silence are blasting through the still dawn air.

You know, there's all kind of insurgents, malicious, armies, you name it.

Everybody has a gun at that point, and it's absolute chaos.

On Tuesday night, I gave the order for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq.

We normalized with that idea of like I could be dead now later, you know if I die I die I mean it is what it is.

This looks as if it's the night when the war will hit Baghdad hard. Theres alatif is the bass play in a crassicouda, widely regarded as the first ever heavy metal band to come out of Iraq who burst onto the scene in 1999. More accurately

there are Thrash Metal Band, a more aggressive high-tempo version. It's a style of

music which perhaps unsurprisingly in the 90s when Firas was growing up wasn't exactly common in Iraq.

Actually I got interested in music throughout my family.

My older brother and sister, they used to, you know,

...