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Sajda Obaid: Iraq’s leopard-print diva and sonic disruptor of the night
Text Yasmin Alrabiei
”Il3ab… Il3ab, willek, il3ab” … You don’t need to understand the lyrics to feel the urgency in Sajda Obaid’s tone. Her voice barrels through language barriers– part command, part flirtation– summoning bodies into a motion that feels both instinctive and deliberate. That’s why, live and direct from Baghdad to the algorithm, people who have never heard of her before, many of whom don’t even understand a word she’s saying, still willingly get light-headed to her tracks as they throw their hair around in dizzying shapes.
A Roma Iraqi singer who began performing at age 12, Sajda has been a fixture in Iraq’s music scene for decades. Her sound is unmistakable: upbeat, heavily percussive, driven by call-and-response chants and Kawliya dance rhythms, sometimes softened with mawal-style improvisations. In the 2000s, her raucous track Enksrat al-Sheesha (“the shisha broke”) surged in popularity. The song’s title, which alludes obliquely to a woman losing her virginity, flirts with taboo, especially in a society where even a whisper on the topic can scandalise. But Sajda doesn’t mutter. She belts, laughs, and lets the beat detonate any demands for silence.
And even then, Sajda won’t frame her work as transgressive. “I just sing about love. I don’t consider that taboo,” she’s laughed in previous interviews. In many ways, her refusal to self-censor is the point. It’s not that her music sets out to provoke; it simply doesn’t apologise. And that, anywhere in the world as a woman, is radical enough.
Her audiences, like those that pack out Baghdad’s Yarmouk Nightclub, are strikingly mixed: veiled grandmothers and twenty-somethings in bodycon move in rhythmic unison, united by the same lyrics, the same voice. It’s a rare moment where class, age, and style collapse into collective motion. “When I think of a diva I think of her. I truly don’t think she gives a shit about anything,” Iraqi DJ Zee tells me.
Born into a modest Roma family in Baghdad, Sajda began performing at military parties in her early teens. Encouraged by her family, who appreciated the income they so needed, her brother and manager, Iyad Aouda, recalls scrambling to find a small table for her to stand on at just 12 years old. Her Roma heritage, linked with a legacy of entertainment, dance, and public performance, placed her both inside and outside Iraqi culture. On one hand, her vocal style became foundational to Iraqi popular music. On the other, the Roma community, numbering around 200,000– with the exact number unknown as they have never been census-bound , has faced long-standing marginalisation as a minority in Iraq. Though she later relocated to Irbil in the Kurdish north, Sajda has insisted in an interview that Baghdad is where she truly belongs: “In Baghdad, I find myself. It is me.”
That said, there’s a complexity to Sajda’s relationship with power and politics, and perhaps to many in Iraq’s Roma community more broadly, a people of Northern Indian origin whose histories have been long sidelined, even as their music and dance pulse through the nation’s cultural core. Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, some members of the Roma community experienced a rare kind of visibility: valued for their role in entertainment, they were simultaneously marginalised and patronised, perceived as a ‘poor but spirited’ underclass. Sajda, a regular on the private party circuit during that era, navigated this paradox deftly. Popular, yes, but she was also subject to the perils of proximity to authoritarian whims. Uday Hussein, Saddam’s notoriously unhinged son, once told her he liked her music but couldn’t tolerate that a Roma performer shared a name with his mother, Sajda Talfah. Her reply? “I was born before your mother.” It’s a line that captures her entire persona; sharp and unbothered.
Yet, she’s also on record in later interviews expressing nostalgia for that era, and grieving what has become of Iraq, echoing the sentiments of her community. In 2020, six Roma elders, each representing an individual Roma tribe, met with the Human Rights Office of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), highlighting longstanding issues of discrimination and socio-economic exclusion. Despite having a presence in Iraq for centuries, the Roma community reported barriers to housing, employment, and political representation, worsened by unresolved pre-2003 naturalisation policies and systemic marginalisation. Later, the Roma elders called for government action to secure land, jobs, and legal recognition, asserting their right to equal treatment within Iraqi society. It’s a reminder that marginalised communities can still experience forms of relative protection or prosperity under oppressive regimes that complicate what is usually seen as a dichotomous political reality; though it is anything but. My own family suffered heavy persecution under Saddam, and we still feel the impact of that today, which makes the layered contradictions of belonging, visibility, and marginalisation in Iraq all the more stark.
In recent years, Sajda’s music has surged through digital spaces with viral momentum, remixed and reimagined into the unofficial soundtrack of TikTok dances. Transcending borders, languages, and contexts to embed itself within global meme culture; comments include “I don’t even speak Arabic but my whole playlist is Sajda Obaid”, “I’m from Japan and I listen to her first thing in the morning to get hyped” and “she’s so real (I’m a central asian nomad).” Her songs fuel the traditional hecha’a hair-whipping dance, with users writing shaʿar shaʿar under viral posts (literally exclaiming hair, hair). It is typically performed by Iraqi women in moments of emotional climax at weddings. Now, on TikTok, users from all corners of the map perform the dance with abandon, often in bedroom mirrors or wedding halls, their bodies caught between ritual and frenzy. It’s sensual, wild, rhythmically possessed. And deeply embodied.
Historically rooted in the Roma and Kawliya communities, this dance holds a special place as a girlhood memory for many of us from the region, shaped by the Iraqi music video vixens who once dominated screens. Beyond mere sensuality, these gorgeous women with mermaid length hair always seemed to hover on the edge of ecstatic release, their movements a silent testimony to long-held desires and unspoken sentiments. Those music videos were a portal into my own nascent ideas on what womanhood might feel like. Some argue the thudding footfalls that “awaken the earth” recall ancient Mesopotamian fertility rites; others say it is a pure embodiment of grief and joy. And online, that energy has electrified a new generation. Users who don’t even recognise the language of the song or know the cultural backstory throw themselves into it– not as caricature, but as catharsis. “Y’all, I don’t even speak Arabic but this beat got me possessed,” one caption reads.
I can’t help but notice similarities to Cheba Warda and other women of North Africa’s raï movement. Sajda insists on being loud, commanding, and sensual; taking all three to theatrical excess. There is something about women that sing loudly and in leopard print that is unmistakably defiant and feminine all at once. Last summer, I heard Cheba Warda’s ‘Galbi’ and Sajda’s ‘Enksrat al-Sheesha’ and ‘Khala Shako’ slip into the setlists of MENA DJs across London. The resonance of these tracks through speakers is more than just a nostalgic callback; it underscores a lineage of confrontational femininity in music. Women like Sajda and Cheba Warda have carved out space within cultural terrains that have historically sought to either silence or exoticise them. For the crowd, it’s not just entertainment, it’s a vicarious release, a collective exhale against the forces that so often hold our breath in expression and desire.
Even Iraqis who might feel ambivalent towards her still know her words by heart– sometimes secretly. “We do listen to her,” one of my younger cousins in Al-Kut admitted, giggling as we listened to her pleading anthem ‘sadkuni.’ “But… in private.” When I visited them in the South of Iraq last year, a friend at my cousin’s school shared an anecdote that everyone found hilarious; “Apparently a man insisted on interrupting her during a show around here once and she just told him to ‘shut up and dance.’” Though I’ve never met her, that absolutely sounds like something she would do.
Unsurprisingly, Obaids reach defies all the neat binaries; sects, genders, the traditional and transgressive, and now the IRL/URL. As likely to echo in a wedding hall in Najaf as it is in a dorm room of a teen in Toronto. A friend recently messaged me just to say, “who is this Iraqi singer I keep hearing on TikTok? I’m obsessed.”
And yet, for all her unique singularity, Sajda Obaid carries a spirit that feels intimately familiar. On a recent visit to Iraq, I recognised glimmers of that same defiant vitality in so many of the women I encountered– in my family, in passing strangers, in the young girls laughing together in Baghdad Mall. Bold, unbothered, and quick-witted, sharp humour sharpened by hardship and honed in the margins. It wasn’t just strength, it was a mesmerising self-possession. I met women who moved through the world with a charisma that could only be forged through fire, an unflinching charm that looks chaos in the eye and says, “what’s that got to do with me?” then keeps on dancing.