A storyteller and cultural bridge-builder, Yamam Nabeel uses art, film, and community projects to preserve Iraqi memory and amplify voices too often silenced.

Yamam Nabeel is many things: an Iraqi in diaspora, a filmmaker, a photographer, an arts organiser, and a former youth outreach pioneer. Across decades of movement — from Baghdad to France, Syria, Lebanon, Germany, Hungary, and the UK — he has consistently sought to build bridges, amplify silenced voices, and challenge dominant Western narratives about Arabs and the Middle East.

But Yamam’s life cannot be told without beginning with his father, Nabeel Yasin. One of Iraq’s most renowned poets, Yasin’s refusal to bend his writing to Saddam Hussein’s ideology forced him into exile.

In 1980, he fled Iraq with his wife, Nada, and their three-year-old son, Yamam. Labelled an enemy of the state, Yasin’s crime was poetry. In England, his verses were smuggled back into Iraq, where they became symbols of resistance and survival. The family later lived in Hungary until the fall of communism in 1991, before finally settling in London.

It was against this backdrop of poetry, politics, and exile that Yamam grew up — shaped by both rupture and resilience.

Returning to Iraq

Yamam’s first return to Iraq in 2007 remains unforgettable. Landing amid the residual sectarian tensions of post-invasion Iraq, him and his companions were escorted under government protection. Their minibus had just exited Baghdad airport when an American convoy suddenly roared past. Radios crackled: it was Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s former adviser, being escorted to court.

“It was the same Tariq Aziz that was the main reason we left Iraq… because he threatened us”, Yamam recalls. The surreal juxtaposition — arriving in a homeland unseen for decades, only to cross paths with the man whose shadow had shaped his family’s exile — was almost cinematic.

Beyond this dramatic welcome, Yamam’s return marked the beginning of projects that brought him face-to-face with young Iraqis, through football, cultural programming, and community work.

Football as Cultural Bridge

Since 2003, Yamam pioneered football as a tool for rebuilding social trust. In 2008, he launched FC Unity, a social enterprise promoting peace, unity, and tolerance by bringing together young people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Its first program took place in Najaf, where Yamam and his team drove through the city distributing jerseys — often stopping unannounced wherever they saw large groups of children. With support from the England FA, over a thousand football shirts made their way into Iraqi hands.

The initiative quickly grew. In Najaf’s main stadium, FC Unity organised a multi-community tournament bringing together players aged anything between eight and into the late twenties, across sectarian and provincial divides. Despite searing heat that left organisers on the verge of collapse, the symbolic importance was undeniable: for the first time in years, Iraqis of different backgrounds played together on the same field.

The success in Najaf led to a second and third tour in Baghdad, where in just five days FC Unity held over 11 events with the help of community journalists, media producers, professional footballers, and local volunteers.

The legendary Iraqi footballer Ammo Baba lent his support, opening his academy to the project. Mixed teams — Christians, Sunnis, Shi‘as, Kurds — played side by side. In a groundbreaking moment, the Women’s College of Physical Education organised a women’s tournament, offering young women an opportunity to participate in public sport at a time when they had been largely excluded.

By May 2009, the momentum culminated in a two-day tournament at Shaab Stadium in Baghdad’s Rusafa district. Thirty-two community teams participated, alongside four “combined” games mixing U.S. soldiers and Iraqi security forces.

More than just sport, the event symbolised hope for normalcy in a country still scarred by violence.  “What we created was a space where it became completely natural for people to come together and play. Americans with Iraqis, and Iraqis from different communities, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or social background. We never saw something like this before”, Yamam explained.

For him, football was never just a game; it was a platform for dialogue, reconciliation, and cultural renewal.

From Football to the Cultural Field

As Iraq’s political climate shifted, Yamam transitioned from football pitches to the arts. He co-founded Art Forward, a platform for cultural production and storytelling. With partners in gallery curation and financial strategy, he built a space where film, photography, writing, and immersive experiences could converge to amplify voices often marginalised in mainstream narratives.

Among Art Forward’s landmark initiatives was I’m Migrant,  a multimedia project of film, photography, exhibitions, and written word that highlights the lives of immigrant and exiled artists, poets, and writers from the Arab world and their contributions to Western culture.

One strand of this project was a documentary series in 2024, focusing on six Iraqi artists and intellectuals in exile. Through interviews, conversations, and film-based portraits, Yamam pieced together fragments of the Iraq that lived on outside its borders — a cultural continuity preserved by those who had left.

The series profiled painter Afifa Aleiby, whose work bridges Iraqi heritage with European modernism; calligrapher Ghani Alani, a foremost preserver of classical Arabic script; the celebrated contemporary artist Hassan Massoudy, who blends script with abstraction; painter and cartoonist Faisel Laibi Sahi, known for his satirical takes on Iraqi social life; poet and dissident Nabeel Yasin; and filmmaker Koutaiba Al-Janabi, whose award-winning work explores memory and displacement.

Together, their unique but interconnecting stories challenged the familiar trope of exile as rupture and loss, instead presenting it as rebirth — a space of cultural continuity, innovation, and survival. For Yamam, the project was also deeply personal: an act of reconstructing the Iraq he could not grow up in, through the lives and legacies of artists he encountered in Europe.

Memory, Diaspora, and Cultural Continuity

At the heart of Yamam’s work lies an ethic of responsibility: to preserve memory, to give voice, and to resist erasure. Whether through mentorship, exhibitions, or film, his aim is to challenge Western narratives that reduce Arab identity to conflict, by showing how Arab cultures have enriched and continue to enrich European and global life.

Photography, particularly film-based, has become central to his practice. He values the medium’s authenticity — the chemical capture of light — which he contrasts with the intangibility of digital data. “Film captures the moment chemically, creating a direct imprint of reality”, he explains. For him, photography is not about self-promotion but about ethical representation and platforming others. “If you platform others… you elevate yourself with them”, he adds.

Language, too, embodies both continuity and rupture. Raised in Hungary, Yamam’s first language was Hungarian; his work now is in English, while his “heart and soul” remain Iraqi. “You don’t lose your Iraqiness, but you lose your ability to read Arabic… it’s a small price to pay because they’ve paid the ultimate price of losing their parents”, he reflects, referring to the sacrifices of earlier generations in exile.

Carrying Iraq Forward

From football tournaments in Baghdad stadiums to exhibitions across Europe, Yamam Nabeel embodies the interplay of art, activism, and memory. For him, connection to Iraq is not about borders or physical return but about something carried inside — a living presence that endures wherever he is.

“I don’t care whether I’m an Arab or not, I’m an Iraqi. That’s what I’m proud of”, he affirms. Iraq, for Yamam, is in the language he speaks at home, in the cadence of memory, in the stories he curates, and in the spaces he creates for others. “Do you know… this is Iraq. I made Iraq here in my living room. This is my Iraq”.

Across lands, languages, and mediums, Yamam carries Iraq not as nostalgia for a place left behind, but as a living culture — recreated, reimagined, and shared. His work ensures that this Iraq — the Iraq of resilience, creativity, and continuity — is passed on to those who will inherit the stories yet to be told.

This article is part of “Diaspora Voices”, Jummar’s monthly series exploring the stories of Iraqis abroad—building new connections between Iraq and its diaspora.