Iraq — home, for a while
“If one among us on earth dies, we bury him. If earth dies, tell me — where do we bury it?”
In my years in Iraq, I kept thinking about this line over and over again. It’s from “Death Certificate”, a poem written by a man from the city of Mosul called Dr Walid al-Sarraf.
It captured what I saw of Iraq between when I first arrived to report on the country in 2017, to when I moved there in 2020, to the present day. I am now saying, “ farewell, see you again soon, I hope,”’ to a place that taught me so much.
Iraqis know death too well. Its memory lingers in the streets: the faces of members of the security forces killed in years of suicide attacks peer down from the checkpoints that dot the city. Graveyards overflow with people who should not have died young, but were gunned down or disappeared or otherwise murdered.
Almost every Iraqi I know is able to describe in detail surviving multiple wars and other upheavals. Those who fled the country have equally difficult feelings about what it means to be forced into “ghurba” — absence from the homeland. There is the Iran-Iraq war — a conflict little talked about in the west but which killed over a million people and left an indelible mark on both countries. Then there was Saddam Hussein’s brutal “Anfal” campaign against the country’s ethnically Kurdish population, his crackdown on Shia Muslims, and his invasion of Kuwait, followed by years of international sanctions that deprived millions of decent nutrition. Afterwards came the 2003 US-led invasion, and the sectarian conflict that followed the poorly-planned occupation. Then came the Islamic State group. At first I was taken aback at how blithely many Iraqis seemed to view the coronavirus, before realising that in comparison to what they had experienced, a pandemic was small fry. That is not how things should have been, of course — but it highlights the intensity of the history that they have had to live.
Iraq today is a different place. While the threat of violence from the Islamic State and other armed groups remains, Iraqis have the space to enjoy life in a way that was impossible for them for years. At weekends, Baghdad shopping malls are bursting to the seams: children run around squealing in delight at displays of mechanical dinosaurs; young couples amble around eating vibrantly-coloured ice cream; housewives shop for new appliances in the plethora of shops heaving with plastic bits and bobs imported from China.
So when I thought about why Dr Sarraf’s poem stuck with me, it was because it reflected so accurately the Iraq in front of me. Iraq is not a wasteland patrolled by US troops — it has not been for a long time — but nor is it an easy place for Iraqis to thrive.
Rather than reporting on daily car bombings and militant takeovers of oil fields — that sort of death was, thankfully, a rare occurrence — I found that some of the most vital stories were to be found elsewhere. They were found in attempting to untangle the webs of vested interests, corruption and political power plays that mean, quite simply, life is harder for ordinary Iraqis than it should ever have to be. They were in unravelling why laws that would — on paper at least — properly govern how money and resources should be divvied up, were instead replaced by endless handshake deals and backroom talks. They were in wondering, when politicians had enough money for fleets of Land Cruisers, gold sofas and private security, why did thousands of people still live in shanty towns without electricity or plumbing?
They were also in reporting the decimation of the climate, on which havoc has been wreaked by years of rising temperatures, corruption, government mismanagement and over-reliance on the country’s vast oil reserves. If earth dies, where do we bury it?
While luxury restaurants and enormous sports utility vehicles line the streets of Baghdad’s wealthy districts, the earth is dying. I have never seen the effects of climate change quite so acutely anywhere else: soaring temperatures, drought, desertified lands. Unlike many westerners in Iraq, cooped up behind cement blast walls and barbed wire by zealous security protocols, I was able to roam. Doing so, I saw how vast tracts of land had simply dried up into grey dust — unusable for the agriculture that Iraq needs to stop relying on imports to feed its population. Poor waste management policies mean rubbish piles in the streets, rotting in the blistering summer heat.
In the southern city of Basra, years of poor planning and convoluted contracts between international oil firms and the Iraqi government mean that gas produced at oil fields is burnt off in Hieronymus Bosch-like scenes, flares illuminating the night sky and slowly poisoning the surrounding populations. In 2022, I visited people internally displaced by conflict in Anbar whose suffering had been compounded by almost non-stop dust storms. They were one of the perilous effects of a slow government response to the effects of climate change, the clouds of orange dust leaving their children coughing and ruining their makeshift homes.
Among this, there is beauty. Baghdad is a sublime city, its layers of history etched into every building on every street. Driving along one of its expressways, my colleague and I would pass the Abbasid-era city walls; we would wait for officials in Brutalist 20th-century ministry edifices; we would take shortcuts through backstreets to avoid the terrible traffic jams, revealing tiny locked-up churches and late Ottoman-era townhouses built from honey-coloured brick. Then there were the countless monuments and statues built in Saddam Hussein’s era. They have been reclaimed by Baghdadis as a testament to their city, rather than the dictator who once overshadowed it.
Iraqis are unfailingly kind and generous. During the commemorations for Ashura, a period of religious mourning marked by Shia Muslims, my neighbours knocked on the door, weighed down with plates of rice and stew. My colleagues treated me like a strange sort of foreign sister, welcoming me into their pack and looking out for me as if I was a blood relative. Over and over again, Iraqis consistently gave me their time and shared their experiences with me. Our conversations ranged from the sad to the surreal: there were the interviews with Iraqi Kurds whose relatives had gone missing on the smugglers’ route to Europe. They wanted a way out of the poverty and hardships of home. Another day, I found myself describing British cancel culture to a senior cleric in the Shia Muslim holy city of Najaf, after he asked me why so many people seemed to hate J.K. Rowling.
I quickly realised that to come anywhere close to understanding Iraq — and “understanding” the place is never something I would claim to have done — I needed to expand my Lebanese-Syrian Arabic to embrace the gutteral Iraqi dialect. I grew to love it, fascinated by the mix of Turkish and Farsi words in the Arabic that I had never previously encountered in nearly a decade of learning the language. Favourites: damagh-siz (“brainless”); choqlomba (“an acrobatic jump”); chumbar (a wooden cart for street sellers).
Much more commonly than any of those, I’d hear, “klawat.” It is a derogatory term that Iraqis often use to describe the ruling elite. Its best translation is something like, “clownish tricksters”, and it was a salient insight into what most thought of their leaders.
Iraqis want to be able to live in safety, with clean water, electricity, and job opportunities. It is not much to ask. These are things that are bizarrely deprived from too many in a country that, on paper, has a wealth of resources. But I am also not optimistic that the vested interests of those who hold power will allow these things to materialise any time soon.
My favourite memories of Iraq will probably sound very boring to those who expect every moment in a country that produced Saddam Hussein and lots of ISIS fighters to be fraught and dangerous. I will tell you about how my most treasured moments include being cajoled into endless sets of burpees in my beloved Baghdad gym, by trainers who bought me a chocolate cake on my birthday. Of cruising the empty streets in friends’ cars at night, safe in their company. Of being told by an Iraqi minister that my dictaphone, “looks like The Terminator.” Of interviewing a governor in a portakabin next to a policeman with a diamante fringe on his hat. Of meeting the pet ostriches of a wealthy Basrawi sheikh. Of climbing mountains and jumping into rivers and dams — all the better for beating back the 49C heat. Of puttering around ancient sites, prime among them the ancient city of Hatra and the 9th century minaret of Samarra. I feel bloody lucky to have called Iraq home, at least for a while.