By Brojen Thangjam
“We live amid ruins, but the ruins also live inside us.” Sinan Antoon – Iraqi Poet
The Call of Mesopotamia: Land Between the Rivers
Two years in New York had left me worn down by UN bureaucracy, so when a deployment to Iraq surfaced, I accepted almost on instinct. Colleagues were puzzled that I would trade a comfortable headquarters post for a mission classified as “high-risk.” Iraq was never just another assignment; it carried the weight of the UN’s darkest moment—the 2003 Canal Hotel bombing that took the head of the mission, Sérgio de Mello, and several others, a wound the institution still carries. Even so, I felt a pull toward something different, perhaps even something more meaningful.
The flight from New York to Baghdad was long, and somewhere between duty-free aisles and boarding announcements, I picked up a few books on Iraq. Once settled into the narrow cocoon of my seat, I began to read. The pages pulled me quickly into the ancient world I was flying toward.
Mesopotamia earned its name as the land between rivers—the Tigris and the Euphrates. From around 3500 BCE, its city-states pioneered settled agriculture, irrigation, early mathematics, and the first known writing. Much of what we call “civilization” took root in these plains. Hammurabi’s legal code, carved around 1750 BCE, is remembered for its blunt formulation—an eye for an eye. Its purpose was restraint rather than vengeance, justice measured in proportion. Yet even that early attempt at order felt austere, especially when read against a land still marked by cycles of retaliation far more violent than any ancient law imagined.
Babylon shimmered in legend. The Hanging Gardens—if they existed—were said to have been built to ease a queen’s longing for her mountain home, lifting greenery and water against gravity itself. The image lingered with me: love translated into architecture, defying climate and terrain.
And then there were the Thieves of Baghdad. Ali Baba’s tale, familiar from childhood, resurfaced unexpectedly. Stripped of its drama, its lessons were simple: greed consumes itself, loyalty demands courage, and sometimes survival turns on knowing the right words. “Open sesame” even became my default password for new UN accounts—until the system insisted on stronger habits.
As the plane dipped toward Baghdad, I thought about how easily a place with such layered history is reduced, in global shorthand, to a “conflict zone.” Ancient splendour alone, I realised, does not guarantee peace or belonging. Those require effort, care, and the difficult work of holding societies together. When the aircraft finally came to a halt, I felt an unexpected steadiness. A new chapter was beginning.
That layered past receded the moment the door opened. Iraq announced itself not through history, but through security protocols.
First Glimpses of Baghdad: The Drive to the Green Zone:
The drive from the airport to the UN compound unfolded through a sequence of fortified checkpoints, each tighter than the last. By the time we entered what everyone simply called the Green Zone, it was clear that in Baghdad power had withdrawn behind layers of concrete and steel.
Despite its name, the Green Zone is not particularly green. It is a walled city within a city, sealed off by towering T-walls—those monotonous slabs of concrete that came to define the post-2003 landscape. The term itself dated back to the early days of the occupation, when this enclave was shaded green on military maps to mark it as “safe.” Everything beyond it was the Red Zone. What struck me was its peculiar geography: a bend in the Tigris formed a natural barrier on one side, while a full military division secured the open end. With bridges tightly controlled, the enclave became a fortified island—seat of ministries, embassies, and armoured residences. Power, privilege, and quiet intrigue coexisted here, behind concrete walls and guarded gates.
The UN compound occupied a repurposed building whose past was never fully clear. Some local staff said it had once been a school for the children of Iraq’s elite—a place where privilege was learned early. The classrooms were gone, but I sometimes wondered what those spaces had felt like before history swept through and rewrote the script.
And then there was the Tigris. For a river so steeped in myth and memory, it appeared almost modest. Its surface barely moved, especially when compared to the rivers of my childhood. Yet beneath that calm flowed the sediments of Mesopotamia, carrying traces of the worlds where humanity first learned to write, to rule, and wage wars.
My arrival coincided with the Iraqi Army’s push to retake Mosul from ISIS. It was a grinding campaign, heavy with civilian suffering and looming humanitarian need. Aid workers were already arriving, preparing for the moment the city would be declared liberated. My role was simple enough: to help ensure they could move safely as front lines shifted. After the procedural rhythms of headquarters life, the urgency was unmistakable. The work had begun.
Within this fortified stillness, a far more violent rupture was already gathering momentum.
When the Black Flags Rose: The Emergence of ISIS
ISIS did not simply arrive; it announced itself. Its rise felt sudden, but the drama was carefully staged. Black flags, choreographed brutality, and the calculated use of cameras signalled a movement intent not only on seizing territory but on capturing imagination. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi appeared in Mosul’s al-Nouri Mosque in July 2014 to proclaim a caliphate, the moment carried the weight of theatre as much as ideology. Yet ISIS cannot be understood without tracing the years of upheaval that reshaped Iraq after 2003.
President George W. Bush’s promise of a “beacon of democracy” proved ill-suited to Iraq’s fractured realities. Elections were held, but they revealed divisions more sharply than they healed them. The governments that emerged after 2005 were Shia-led, a shift many Sunnis experienced as abrupt exclusion from a state they had long dominated. By the time U.S. forces withdrew in 2011, Iraq resembled a house rebuilt too quickly—standing, but structurally unsound.
ISIS entered through those cracks. It fed on grievance, on communities pushed to the margins, and on a security apparatus that had lost coherence. The war in neighbouring Syria turned borders into corridors, moving fighters, weapons, and ideas with ease. Out of this turbulence emerged a group that fused military organisation, territorial ambition, and apocalyptic certainty.
By 2014, Iraqi forces were collapsing with alarming speed. Cities did not so much fall as give way, hollowed out by disenchantment. ISIS understood spectacle instinctively. Each capture reinforced the illusion of inevitability, drawing recruits convinced that history itself was on the move.
The reversal began quickly. When ISIS pushed toward Erbil in August 2014, U.S. airstrikes slowed its advance just long enough for Iraqi and Kurdish forces to regroup. An international coalition followed, steadily tightening pressure. ISIS’s fatal error was overreach. Holding territory meant fixed targets, and fixed targets invited precision strikes.
The liberation of Mosul in July 2017 ended the territorial caliphate, but not the movement—a reminder, in Iraq, that victories are rarely final and peace is always provisional.
Sistani’s Call to Arms: Faith as a Last Line of Defence
The collapse of Mosul not only exposed the weakness of the state; it also drew in forces that rushed to fill the void it left behind. As ISIS advanced across northern Iraq, the country turned to faith as a last line of defence. No account of Iraq in those years feels complete without recalling the moment Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani intervened. In June 2014, as the army collapsed with alarming speed, the country slipped into uncertainty. Baghdad waited—tense, exposed. It was in this atmosphere of fear and an unmistakable vacuum of authority that Sistani issued his historic fatwa, declaring the defence of the nation a collective obligation and calling on able citizens to step forward.
The response was swift and unmistakable. Dormant militias regrouped, volunteers crowded recruitment centres, and the Popular Mobilization Forces began to take shape. Its core was overwhelmingly Shia, though others joined as well. The intervention achieved its immediate aim: ISIS’s advance slowed, and Iraq gained the breathing room it desperately needed.
As I travelled across the Shia south, especially around Basra, the memory of that mobilisation lingered. Street posters still carried the faces of young men who joined the fight and never returned. Losses were felt across the country, but the southern provinces bore the heaviest burden. Those faces remain, a quiet reminder that when the state falters, it is citizens who pay the steepest price.
What began as an emergency response, however, did not fade with the battlefield. Over time, the PMF hardened into something more permanent—a network with military, political, and economic weight. Where the state’s presence remained thin, it was often the PMF that maintained order, manned checkpoints, mediated disputes, and imposed a fragile stability that communities came to rely upon. By the time Iraq turned toward recovery, the PMF had become not only a fighting force but a political bloc and, in many places, the authority people encountered most directly.
This is a familiar dilemma in post-conflict societies. Forces that rush in to fill a void during a crisis rarely withdraw neatly in peace. Power acquired in the absence of firm institutions seldom recedes on its own—and the line between protection and dominance can quietly blur.
The Yazidis: A People Waiting to Return Home
Driving toward the Sinjar mountains near the Syrian border, the landscape shifted in quiet, telling ways. Roadside kiosks sold beer cans; small, whitewashed shrines perched on hillocks, recalling the temple mounds scattered across northern India. We had entered Yazidi land. One of the region’s oldest communities, rooted for centuries in Sinjar, their faith is a gentle, syncretic tradition. Its rituals, reverence for nature, and oral traditions felt oddly familiar.
But theirs is a history repeatedly broken by persecution, and in 2014 it shattered once again. When ISIS overran Sinjar, the Yazidis were targeted as “infidels.” What followed were mass killings and enslavement on a scale the UN later recognised as genocide. Entire villages were emptied; thousands of men were killed; women and children abducted or sold. Even now, the enormity of that violence is hard to absorb.
A decade later, the question many still ask is why so many Yazidis remain displaced when reconstruction efforts—including new housing—exist on paper. The International Organization for Migration offers a clear answer. According to its 2024 assessment, more than 183,000 people from Sinjar remain displaced, and over half of the district’s pre-2014 population has yet to return.
The reasons, IOM notes, are not mysterious: insecurity, destroyed homes, limited services, scarce livelihoods, and the physical and emotional scars left by war. But beneath these practical obstacles lies something deeper—what IOM describes as “contested local administration and governance.” In simple terms, too many actors claim authority in Sinjar: the federal government, the Kurdistan Regional Government, local Yazidi bodies, and several armed groups. With no single, trusted administration in place, even basic matters—policing, land titles, repairing water systems—become entangled. IOM also observes that some political actors quietly benefit from the slow pace of return, as prolonged displacement keeps populations dependent and territorial questions unresolved. It is a pattern that resonates far beyond Iraq.
What stayed with me most was the quiet dignity of the people I met. They long to return—not to grand promises, but to safety, to land they know, to communities that can breathe again. Yet their future depends on decisions made by those far more powerful, and often far less affected. It is a painful reminder, familiar in more than one corner of the world, of how easily politics can sit atop the suffering of ordinary families who ask only to go home.
A Nation Without a State: The Kurds of Iraq
If the Yazidis revealed the cost of abandonment, the Kurds showed what persistence can carve out, even without a state. The Kurds of Iraq carry their history with a quiet resilience that has survived borders, broken promises, and repeated attempts at erasure.
In mid-2022, I met the newly appointed mayor of Sulaymaniyah, Hewa Ahmed, in his immaculately kept office. What began as a courtesy call stretched into lunch and stories of family sacrifice. Before I left, he handed me a signed copy of I Am Ahmed 224, a book about his father’s long imprisonment under Saddam Hussein—a small, personal window into the larger Kurdish struggle.
For those of us working in Iraq, trips to Erbil, Dohuk, or Sulaymaniyah felt like stepping briefly outside the tight, regulated confines of the Baghdad compound. The Kurdish cities offered space to breathe, to reset, and to remember what ordinary civic life could look like.
The Kurdish story stretches deep into history. One of the oldest continuous peoples of the Middle East/West Asia, they have long been rooted in the Zagros mountains. They lived under successive empires—Persian, Ottoman, Arab—but never within a state of their own. After the First World War, borders were redrawn across the region, leaving Kurdish aspirations divided among new states and political systems.
In Iraq, the Kurds nonetheless carved out a distinct political space. The post-2003 constitutional order granted the Kurdistan Region autonomy, its own institutions, security forces, and a defined place within national power-sharing. The Iraqi presidency, though limited in executive authority, became a visible symbol of Kurdish presence at the heart of Baghdad.
The Peshmerga had long embodied Kurdish identity, but the war against Islamic State thrust them into global view. Some of that attention was earned on the battlefield; some carefully shaped through international narratives. Like any force under strain, they were uneven—brave and committed yet constrained by training and resources. What stayed with me, though, was their generosity: opening training sites, walking us through deactivated IEDs, sharing what they knew so our work could continue.
Identity in Iraq, I was learning, is never singular. It moves between land, language, faith, and shaped as much by what is denied as by what is claimed.
Ibrahim’s Footsteps: Faith, Memory, and the Burden of Sacred Landscapes
I visited Nasiriyah ahead of the October 2021 elections, walking into a place where ancient history and present hardship sit side by side. To the east lay the edges of the Mesopotamian Marshes—once among the world’s largest wetlands, covering roughly 15,000–20,000 square kilometres. This wider landscape has been shaped for millennia by the Tigris and Euphrates, whose waters sustain the marsh ecosystem. For generations, the Marsh Arabs lived from fishing, buffalo herding, and rice cultivation. Their defiance of Saddam Hussein’s directives in the 1990s drew the regime’s anger, and the state moved to drain the marshes. Even today, the scars remain: wetlands shrank, salinity rose, and families who had lived here for centuries were displaced almost overnight. It is a reminder that when leaders act recklessly or vindictively, it is the land and its people who pay the deepest price.
But this is also a region that carries the memory of Ibrahim—Abraham—the shared patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. On 6 March 2021, during his visit to Iraq, Pope Francis stood near the ruins of Ur, close to Nasiriyah, and called it “the land of our father Abraham.” Earlier that day, he had met Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf, a rare and carefully balanced engagement. Together, these moments carried a simple message: Iraq’s spiritual lineage begins with a figure common to all three faiths, not with the sectarian fractures that have shaped recent decades. The Pope invoked Abraham’s story to urge humility, coexistence, and a fragile but necessary healing.
Around the same time, the Abraham Accords were reshaping regional diplomacy. They too invoked Abraham’s name, largely to frame Arab–Israeli normalisation as a return to shared origins. While the purposes were different, the symbolism and language overlapped in telling ways.
These repeated references to Abraham brought to mind Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington argued that after the Cold War, global politics would be shaped less by ideology than by broad cultural groupings. He identified several major “civilizations”—Western, Islamic, Hindu, Orthodox, Sinic, Japanese, and Latin American—and suggested that identities rooted in religion, culture, and long memory could become the main fault lines of future conflict.
Today, as China is increasingly described as a “civilizational state,” some of Huntington’s ideas feel newly relevant. It raises difficult questions: could the “people of the Book” ever be imagined, even loosely, as a civilizational grouping? And what would that mean for communities whose identities do not fit neatly into such categories? There are no clear answers. But in a place like Nasiriyah, where memory and uncertainty sit side by side, such questions come naturally.
The Quiet Wars: Land Grabs in Baghdad
While symbols spoke of unity and shared origins, the city itself told a harsher, more practical story. In Baghdad, the old order was collapsing faster than a new one could form. I kept seeing reports of small IED blasts targeting bars and liquor shops—attacks that caused minimal damage and often no casualties. When I visited one such site with a colleague, the shop was already open again. It became clear these explosions were not acts of terror but messages: warnings, extortion attempts, or the opening move in a takeover.
Subsequent investigations confirmed the pattern. Armed groups and militias—many tied to Shia-dominated political networks—have exploited post-2003 instability to seize high-value real estate. Former Sunni-owned properties, once privileged under Saddam, have been taken through forged deeds, coercive “offers,” or occupations engineered after a conveniently timed blast. Licensed liquor stores, socially sensitive but profitable, are especially vulnerable: a device explodes, the owner is rattled, and soon the business or licence quietly changes hands.
As Baghdad’s sectarian map shifts, land has become a theatre of power. Prices plunged after the war, then surged as those with connections consolidated control. Meanwhile, displaced Sunnis and Christians struggle to reclaim homes and shops tied up in endless legal disputes—records missing, offices unresponsive, occupants already entrenched. In a city still unsettled, controlling property meant controlling identity, leverage, and the future shape of the city itself.
In the End: What Endured
These quieter struggles over land, power, and belonging framed the Iraq I ultimately carried with me. Iraq never became the “beacon of democracy” that George W. Bush once promised. Its democratic experiment ran into structural limits that no amount of institution-building could fully overcome. Elections were held, but they produced a patchwork of sectarian fiefdoms rather than a shared political centre.
Economically, the country stayed tethered to oil—exporting crude while importing refined fuel, despite its vast reserves. Years of underinvestment, political capture, and rent-seeking hollowed out the sector. For many young Iraqis, opportunity narrowed to two paths: public employment, if they were fortunate, or insecure work on the margins.
Regionally, Iraq lived beneath competing shadows. American presence lingered in parts of the north and west; Iranian influence flowed through allied groups. Both treated Iraqi territory as a stage for signalling and leverage. The security sector mirrored these fractures: specialised units guarding the Green Zone, an elite counter-terrorism force operating with relative autonomy, PMF factions exerting political and economic pressure, and an army still struggling to find coherence and confidence.
Whether Iraq will truly stabilise remains an open question. Ordinary Iraqis have endured turbulence far beyond their making—sectarian division, extremist violence, a stalled economy, and foreign powers treating their homeland as strategic terrain. Yet what endures is their resilience, carried with pride and an unbroken spirit.
As the UN mission began to draw down, its record could only be judged against the disorder it inherited. The mandate was vast—elections, reconciliation, human rights, political support—perhaps too vast for such turbulent waters. It did not mend every fracture; no mission could. But within a narrow space, and under a blue flag that no longer guaranteed safety, it worked steadily and without spectacle to help a country hold itself together.
After Mosul fell silent in 2017, work never truly eased. The humanitarian surge came first—camps swelling, assessments changing by the hour—followed by the youth-led protests of 2019, when Baghdad’s bridges became pressure points. The 2021 elections brought another strain, given the scale of the operation. Alongside these political rhythms came shocks of a different order: the killing of Qassem Soleimani and the sharp reminder of how constrained weaker powers could be; the long COVID year spent confined in Iraq; nights when rockets arced over the Tigris toward the Baghdad compound, C-RAM batteries tearing the sky apart.
There was never a dull moment, as we often said among colleagues. Looking back, it is the people I remember most—the national staff who kept working through risk, the skill and commitment they brought each day, and the friendships and camaraderie, across nationalities, that sustained us. Amid the dense succession of crises, each demanding something different, I discovered versions of myself I did not know I carried.
(Brojen Thangjam recently retired from service with the United Nations. He can be reached at [email protected])