"I have been asked once when I was interviewed for a magazine, why I have left Iraq. I said, "I have left Iraq because of my poetry." It is very difficult to stay under these circumstances, under this dictatorship in Iraq, and to stay a poet, a writer. For this reason, I remember we have gotten a cultural organization in the 1980s. The organization has about six hundred members--writers, poets--and now maybe there are a thousand or more. They are living abroad in different countries of the world. Of course there are still some writers and poets in Iraq and some of them are using what we call it in German literature, that is well known, "innere Immigration." That is to stay silent, not write. That is a kind of resistance against the regime."
- Fadhil Al-Azzawi (2002)