An Israeli-Israeli Israeli audience from Tel Aviv to Baghdad

TEL AVIV / BAGDÁ (Reuters) – Israel's Arab-sung music is gaining a broad public base from Tel Aviv to Baghdad because it is reproducing the songs of its grandmothers, an Iraqi Jewish duo who was one of Iraq's most famous artists in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dudu Tasa's new album, titled "Al Hajar," is a mix of modern songs known to his late grandparents Daoud and Saleh al-Kuhayyati, who fled from Iraq to Israel 70 years ago.

Tasa said the pair owned a club and organized parties in the main corridors of Iraq, but in Israel they ended up playing at weddings.

He added that King Faisal II, the last of the kings of Iraq, was impressed by the music of his grandparents.

The family of Israeli musician Tasa, 42, was among the tens of thousands of Iraqi Jews who fled in the mid-20th century to Israel, who in 1948, in addition to the successive defeats of the Arab armies, provoked a wave of public anger and violence against Jews.

Rate says that Saddam ordered the removal of his grandfather, the Kuwaiti brothers, from the Iraqi national archives after he came to power in 1979.

Today, about 600,000 Israelis, out of a population estimated at about nine million, may claim to have an Iraqi background, which Tasa and her group have highlighted in their three albums in Arabic.

"There are a lot of reactions from the Arab world all the time," said Tasa, who regularly salutes shows sold in Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. We see this on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. "

"They send us messages from Iraq and Baghdad saying," Come on, let's sing. "

Among Dudu Tasa fans in Baghdad is an Iraqi girl named Fatima Qabbani, who says her grandfather was behind the modern Iraqi song.

Fatima Qabbani told Reuters Television: "I got my attention, I liked his voice, I loved the way Dodo used to sing, combining heritage, modernity and musical style, I looked for him on YouTube, so I signed up for his own channel, Mullah Doudou, and I always played his songs. "