ABU DHABI: South Korean DJ and singer Peggy Gou is no stranger to the Middle East. She wowed fans this week at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in the UAE, performing in celebration of the newly opened exhibition “From Kalila wa Dimna to La Fontaine: Travelling through Fables,” and revealed that she would consider collaborating with Arab artists.

She told Arab News the morning after the event: “I woke up this morning and was thinking what happened last night. It is one of those events that is so meaningful. I’ve been to Abu Dhabi twice just to see the exhibitions. It’s more than a museum to me. It is a community, where people even go to hang out. That’s how beautiful that place is.”

Gou was among the first performers to take the stage at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in front of an audience, she said.

“I know David Guetta did it once before without an audience during COVID-19 … It was my first time playing in Abu Dhabi. It was insane. It was a very, very special night, and I want to do more,” she added. 

Gou incorporates Arab-inspired music into her performances, noting that “people just love it, and they love percussion.”

To the artist, music is like a feeling. “It is really hard to rationalize it,” she said. “When you love it, you just love it,” she added, expressing her admiration for Arab melodies.

“This is maybe the reason why people support my music, even though they don’t understand the language. Sometimes they just feel it, they just love it,” she explained. 

“I love our music, but at the same time, I’m considering collaborating with an Arab artist because there are a lot of talented Arab musicians here,” she said. “I have many friends here who recommended me some artists, and I want to check it out.

“I never say no. I love making music with different languages.” 

Gou has performed in Saudi Arabia multiple times.

“Every time I go there, it’s different. But what I can say is it’s always changing in a good way. In the very beginning, I felt like they weren’t going to understand my music,” she recalled.

But the DJ said that her last performance in AlUla was one of her favorites. “People were just shouting, screaming, and dancing as if there was no tomorrow,” she said.

London: Terrorist groups in Afghanistan are regrouping in the wake of the Western evacuation from the country and will strike on US and European soil, the leader of an anti-Taliban movement has warned.

The exiled leader of Afghanistan’s National Resistance Front, Ahmad Massoud, said a terror attack in the US or Europe is “not about a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” The Independent reported.

Massoud said circumstances in the country and the wider region resemble the pre-9/11 landscape, with terror training camps opening across Afghanistan.

Ali Maisam Naziry, the NRF’s head of foreign relations, said of the resurgent groups: “The attacks in Russia, Iran and Brussels, and the neutralised attack in Germany, are examples of how fast they are moving to threaten global security.”

He added that since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Afghanistan has witnessed a “massive influx” of foreign terrorist fighters who belong to the more than 20 militant networks operating in the country, including Al-Qaeda, Daesh-Khorasan and the Haqqani Network.

Massoud warned that the West’s commitment to Ukraine and Israel is serving as a distraction, emboldening the Taliban in the process.

Afghanistan is “no longer a priority” for the Biden administration in the US, he told The Independent last year.

Nathan Sales, a former US ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism, said last year: “The continued partnership between the Taliban and Al-Qaeda is perhaps best seen in the fact that after the US withdrawal, Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri resurfaced in Afghanistan, living in a safe house associated with the Haqqani Network, a Taliban faction that maintains close ties to Al-Qaeda and is itself a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.

“The key takeaway is that the Taliban felt emboldened to welcome Al-Qaeda’s leader back to Kabul, and Al-Qaeda’s leader felt it was safe enough there to accept the offer.”