WATCH: Kurdish Pop Diva's anti-ISIS Battle Cry
'The song is called 'Revolution' and I call in it for Kurdistan and the countries of the world to unite to fight terrorism and injustice,' says Helly Luv.
It's unusual for a pop song to have a 2.36-minute intro featuring a dusty, poor Kurdish village on the jihadists' front lines. But it's worth lasting through that beginning, which progresses from peaceful afternoon scenery into war, to reach the anti-ISIS ballad by Kurdish pop diva Helly Luv.
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The video was filmed in the village of Al-Khazr, the 26-year-old Luv told AFP. "The song is called 'Revolution' and I call in it for Kurdistan and the countries of the world to unite to fight terrorism and injustice. I want to show the world who the peshmerga forces are, and who Daesh (the Arabic acronym for ISIS) is," says Luv.
The music in the video, relying heavily on anti-war slogans for lyrics, is Middle East-style but sung in accented English. Born Helan Abdulla in Iran in 1988, according to her official online biography, Luv’s grandfather fought for the peshmerga and she fled Iraq with her family to escape Saddam Hussein’s rule. Luv was then raised primarily in Finland until moving to Los Angeles to pursue a singing career at age 18.