A mural in Iraq depicts an airplane.....

[scotto]

Claim: A mural in Iraq depicts an airplane slamming into buildings resembling the World Trade Center towers.

Status: True.

Origins: On 26 March 2003, a mural showing an airplane crashing into one of two tall vertical buildings and setting it aflame (while a second airplane approaches the other building) was discovered by U.S. Marines searching Iraqi military headquarters in Nasiriya. The plane in this cheerily-hued painting bears the logo and color scheme of Iraqi Airlines.

The now famous photo, which shows two Marines in front of the mural, was taken by Joe Raedle, a photo journalist accompanying the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force from Task Force Tarawa.

No comment has so far been offered as to whether the mural pre-dates the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City or whether it was painted afterwards in celebration of same.

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/mural.php

[conlor]

I know Pads was down for a while, but I'm still surprised no one has said anything about this. Can Snopes be trusted? Is this for real?

[KBay84]

Originally Posted by conlor

I know Pads was down for a while, but I'm still surprised no one has said anything about this. Can Snopes be trusted? Is this for real?

Seen this before in Marine articles elsewhere. For real, yes. Predates 9-11? Hard to say.

[SherryGrace]

I saw it quite awhile back. Not sure what to say. As far as I know its never been dated.

[Snowden]

I seem to remember it being found in one of Saddam's residences - or that of one of his sons. Does anybody remember this, or am I confused? (No surprise there, if so!)

[Bluehawk]

I'll venture a professional guess here...

The paintings are both fairly crudely made, i.e. not done by professionally trained artists. I say this owing to the very awkward drawing technique and use of what are called "prismatic" colors, or colors that have not been mixed (i.e. straight out of the tube.) No professional or skilled artist would ever draw that way or use those kinds of colors, except possibly as a joke.

Iraq does and always did have very fine artist painters, whose work would have been the preferred should the Saddam/Baathist regime have wanted to commission something about aircraft attacks on buildings, whether prospectively or retrospectively. Not even Saddam would have paid those two artists to do their baseboards. Trust me...

So, what that means is that the paintings are essentially "Folk Art", at best. The image to the left is clearly a commemoration of some sort directly related to 9/11 in every sense, painted after the fact.

The image on the right is, to me, quite clearly the work of someone who either:
a) Was trying to imagine what the 9/11 attack looked like, or
b) Was responding to the Bin-Laden/Al-Zawahiri calls to attack buildings with loaded aircraft.

If a), then the artist simply had not seen any television footage of the actual attack.

If b), then it IS quite possible that the right hand painting was done prior to 9/11.

However, having said the above, I am more inclined to believe that even the second (right hand) painting was done after the fact because there is in the upper left part of the image what appears to be a second aircraft which would, it seems to me, not have been a likely composition for anyone to have done were their intention to have been solely to agitate FOR the flying of an aircraft into a large building. I am also further convinced of this assertion by the fact that the airplane shown entering the building is doing so at a level which approximates exactly where those two did collide with the Twin Towers. This is to say, although it might be reasonable to deduce that such a painting might have been done beforehand, there is very little probability that anyone (other than the "pilots", possibly) could have known the location of impact(s) before the fact.

Logic, for example, might recommend an aircraft to collide at the BASE of a large building in order to bring it down. Yet, one must think that a full power nose dive into the bases of Twin Towers from low altitude must surely have been beyond the emotional or technical capacity of even those murderers. I think they just aimed at the buildings and took what they got. Indeed, Bin Laden himself exclaimed his amazement at the high degree of "success" the 9/11 attacks achieved. NONE of them (or anyone else, for that matter) ever dreamt that those two huge structures would actually totally collapse. I believe they were hoping for, at best, what is usually called a "demonstration", rather than having knowingly planned for total demolition.

As an aside, technically, neither of those paintings are sufficiently large to rightly be called a "mural."