There's two types of foreigners in Iraq: the ones who have a screw loose, and the ones that wander in. The vast majority of the foreigners are in the Kurdish north, which I'll refer to as Iraqi Kurdistan or the KRG. The KRG has three major cities: Duhok, Erbil, and Sulaimaniya, which are split between the two political powers: the KDP and the PUK. The history is incredibly complex, but the biggest thing to understand is that while both sides hate each other, they've monopolized all power in the region to become a duopoly of power, the biggest oppressor of the average Kurd is not the Turks who conduct airstrikes in the north⁶, not the Iranians who lob missiles from the east, but rather the joint oppression of the KDP and the PUK. Despite all this, American security combined with lucrative negotiations with the Iranian government has turned Kurdistan into what a friend called "an American-Iranian joint enterprise", perhaps the first of its kind.

Erbil is a bizarre mixture of both types of foreigners. For example, you can end up at a place like the Grill, the Vinery, or the Sheraton Pool, where you'll mingle with defense contractors, NGO workers, and journalists. These places are interesting at first, but usually devolve into the same types of conversations after a little bit, and things can begin to feel a little frat or college-like. The academics, on the other hand, are all a little depressed. The effect on locals is different too, Erbil has grown to become basically a foreigner's town, with tons of money catered towards foreigner tastes. Sitting on the fault line of the KDP and the PUK, who seem to disagree on everything except one thing: investment in Erbil.

Erbil's real estate market is also tremendously warped. Since Erbil has been relatively stable compared to the rest of the country, rich Iraqis have long been stashing money by investing into large real estate projects.

Investment has made Erbil a boomtown, with tons of new construction going up everywhere. Unfortunately, the city is structured like a 12 year old playing SimCity, meaning it's hideously unwalkable, and has strange amenities plopped everywhere, including a golf course that required diverting water from wells that were actively being used.

Duhok is probably the most livable city in Kurdistan. Nestled in the only nice natural part of the north, Duhok is small, but quite livable. I stayed for a few months learning Kurdish, and I enjoyed my time there. Friends who are independent film makers in Duhok repeatedly tell me that Duhok is far better for artists than Erbil, where most of the work is concentrated in propaganda channels. It's no wonder that the Duhok Film Festival, the only festival of its kind in the region, has found great success in recent years. Duhok also remains the only major city on the way to northeast Syria, a population destination for NGO workers. I met and made a great number of good friends who work in Syria during the week, and return to Duhok for the weekends.

View of the valley from the Duhok Dam. Taken in 2021.

Sulaimaniya is the cosmopolitan capital of the KRG. While Erbil is similar to Dubai and has a similar soullessness, and Duhok is a city surrounded by nature, Sulaimaniya is a big city. It's beautiful, and holds a ton more cultural diversity than the other two cities. I've had fun whenever I went to Suli, but I never stayed there for a long time.

Kurdistan as a whole is in an interesting place. The politics have started to become apparent that the PUK have become sidelined, the future has become a little bit more unclear as the KDP collaborates with Turkey frequently. Baghdad's perpetual crisis seems to have eased up a bit, which has then drawn the federal government's attention back to Kurdistan. NGO money also seems to be on the outs in some cases, when the war in Ukraine broke out, I witnessed a ton of the demining NGOs pull up stakes and move up to Europe. Missionaries are everywhere in the KRG, I can't board a plane to Erbil without chatting up a missionary at this point.

Refugee management is also in a strange spot. The Kurdish government has largely used Syrians as a cheap source of labor, seeing the crises in Syria spigot to be managed. This means that the border crossing between Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan is repeatedly closed and reopened, often without any forewarning. However, given the state of infrastructure, most NGOs that work out of Syria still need to base themselves in the KRG.

Furthermore, Syrian refugees receive residence cards valid for a year, as a result of negotiations between the UN and the KRG. However, Iraqi Arabs, who come from places in the South such as Baghdad, receive one month residencies. This means that, without a visa sponsor, Iraqi Arabs who come to Kurdistan can be arrested by the Kurdish internal security, called the Asayish. The Asayish frequently use this as a way of intimidating Arabs from the South. The internal controls between the KRG and Southern Iraq pose another issue, an almost Hong Kong/Macau like situation is imposed upon people, although in HK/Macau the situation is far more formalized, with HK and Macau citizens having a different passport. In Iraq, both Kurds and Arabs hold Iraqi passports, but there is no free movement of people between the north and the south.

Within the KRG, there remain two other complicating factors: religious minorities and the PKK. The KDP arrangement with the Turks has made it so that the PKK are not allowed in most areas, except for one major region: the Nahla valley. The Nahla valley is situated near Duhok, and it is fully controlled by Assyrians. Assyrians themselves hold a complicated relationship with the Kurds. While they are spread out between Erbil and Duhok, some Assryians have fully integrated themselves into the Kurdish lifestyle in Duhok, while others in the Nahla valley hold onto an almost separatist ideal. As a result, there is a gentleman's agreement in the Nahla valley: because the Assyrians in the valley hate the KDP, they allow the PKK to use the valley as a staging ground for operations against Turkey. Turkey, as a result, frequently lobs drone strikes or missile strikes into the valley.

When I visited the valley, it was the first time I had seen so many bombed out roads within the KRG. Normally, Turkish airstrikes are limited to the far north, which are off paved roads and distant villages. However, it's impossible to enter the valley without seeing the destruction the Turks have caused, to great harm as well.

The Iranian-American joint enterprise is aggressively neoliberal, with smuggling rife from the KRG into Iran, and money is the key differential between many people. Foreigners who are holed up in compounds and Syrians and Iraqi Arabs homeless in the streets are a common sight. Many of these foreigners, especially in cities like Erbil and Duhok, use the KRG as a base for their travels to Mosul or into Syria – regions that, despite their challenges, continue to draw international attention and intervention.

Out of all the regions in Iraq, I've been here the least. For me, "West '' Iraq is just Anbar. Ironically, the Euphrates basin is far less polluted than the Tigris, simply because less people are dumping into the river. Hit, a sleepy town along the Euphrates, is a beautiful city characterized by its waterwheels, a UNESCO heritage site that still is active today.

Ramadi has seen an explosion in the last few years. Rapid development, bolstered in part with financing from the central government, has turned Ramadi into a hip destination in the desert. Iraqi friends will often remark on how much Ramadi has grown, with new job opportunities popping up everywhere.

Each region in Iraq, whether it's the West, the North, or the South, has a completely different personality. Mosul and Kurdistan are overrun with NGOs and foreigners, while the South remains a no-go zone for foreigners. Kurds have a completely different culture than Arabs, while Anbaris fundamentally see their position in Iraq differently than the Shi'a majority of the South do. The North is dependent on foreigners, especially the Americans, and it's no surprise the Americans are building their second biggest Middle East State department compound in Erbil. Syrians are treated better in some ways in the North than Iraqi Arabs from the South.

Erbil, the political center of the north, has embarked on the world's worst sim city project, attempting to build golf courses, poorly constructed high density housing, all to try to appeal to the foreign population. A miniature Dubai, in all its excesses. However, in doing so, it has reaped massive benefits while the other cities have languished, Sulimaniya, previously a commercial capital, has fallen behind both economically and politically. However, the duopoly of power between the two parties have strangled economic growth to a certain extent, a system rife with nepotism and thuggary. Everyone knows that there is tremendous waste, huge bribes are paid every year for projects, with overinflated prices that make your eyes water. The two parties are enriching themselves at the cost of the Kurdistan region as a whole.

The South is sprawling, with constant infrastructure and demographic issues. Electricity remains worse, roads remain worse, access to medicine and everything else becomes more scarce with each passing year. Baghdad is creaking at the bones, choked with smog and a growing urban poor problem. Yet in spite of all of this, no such arrangement of power exists in the South like the North. In south Iraq, the complicated sectarian situation has created pockets of protests and progressive movements. I would argue that there is more freedom of speech within Najaf than in all of the KRG.

Anbar, which has retreated into the background following the defeat of Daesh, has also continually gone through its own crises. Anbaris remain distant from the rest of Iraq, distinguished from the Shi'a south and the Kurdish north. Politicians come out of Anbar and become almost gods, Halbousi⁷ was a practical god in Anbar, with his image strung up in every street corner and people talking about how much money he had brought in from the central government to redevelop Ramadi.

A special note about electricity, since this is everyone's first experience in Iraq. Iraqis do have 24 hours of electricity, but the electricity is not consistent. At least twice a day you will switch between government provided electricity, which is very similar to electricity provided in a developed country, and generator (muwallad) provided electricity.

This means that you will have a giant belching generator in your neighborhood, with a generator mafia you pay a stupid amount of money to. This also means that for at least twice a day, you will experience a small blackout. Shorter blackouts mean that you are switching from generator to government. Longer blackouts mean you are switching from government to generator. Notably, you don't want to use an electric kettle on the generator, since you're limited on amperage. The image on the right was the electrical box in my house, responsible for telling you where the electricity is coming from and handling the switch. The arrow at the top that says "وطنية" means government electricity, and the others with "مولد" mean generator.

A fellow PhD friend once mentioned that the media cycle of conflict and post-conflict zones goes from coverage of women + children, to only about children, to then being about animals, and finally about the environment before coverage dies completely. In recent years, the topic of the environment has become very hip to discuss in Iraq. NGO money has poured into climate change, as Iraqis themselves have invested in projects in an attempt to arrest the inexorable desertification⁸. The Marsh Arabs have become at the forefront of this, as desertification of the marshes is the most visible effect of climate change. International organizations, such as IOM, have engaged in climate change projects as a buffer against future refugee flows, assuming that if large chunks of Iraq become uninhabitable, refugees will start moving towards other countries.

On the northern side, the KRG has recently emerged as a small destination for rock climbing and hiking. Projects such as the Zagros Mountain Trail have popularized Kurdistan as a destination for hikers and climbers.

The federal Iraq government and the Kurdistan Regional Government have taken two separate tasks. As mentioned before, the KRG has taken the role of a duopoly in a politburo system, with large networks of patronage spread throughout. As the KRG has enforced and entrenched its oligarchic rule, the federal government struggles to maintain control. The KRG has what people call the "green zone" and the "yellow zone", representing the PUK and the KDP. The no man's land between them recently hosted a protest, where truckers piled up dirt mounds on the road to protest the poor conditions and lack of responsibility for infrastructure in the no man's land.

Checkpoints abound in Iraq, but the checkpoints in Iraq are honestly no different than the ones in the other Middle Eastern countries. There's a small cottage industry of foreigners who come to Iraq only to write about the checkpoints, and to me this is akin to coming to America and writing about toll roads. Checkpoints, so ubiquitous, fade into the background like the electricity problems.

A recent interesting change within the last decade has been new crackdowns on freedom of speech. While limited freedom of speech within the KRG has always been normal⁹, the new social media law passed two years ago has been used to arrest and detain people. The Iraqi Ministry of Information uses a crowdsourced app for people to report content that may be against the law.

Coinciding with this change in digital literacy is the growth in private enterprises. Salaries from the central government and the KRG have routinely been late, which has created a debt industry of people who provide loans until the salary is actually released. This system has been formalized with the growth of electronic payments such as the Qi card.

It's clear that with higher digital usage and electronic payments, combined with new real estate projects growing all over the country from Baghdad to Erbil, has made private investment much more lucrative. Business investment is up overall, but issues around clarity of contracts, such as the TotalEnergies oil contract in Basra, have perpetually made investment difficult, which the central government has routinely failed to simplify.

On top of the contractual problems in Iraq, both governments are simply corrupt. There's reams of literature on the corruption of the central government and the KRG that I won't rehash here, but needless to say trust in both governments is low among the population.

Against the coming environmental disaster, the problem of governance, what is to be done?

The people make Iraq. Iraqis and their culture, despite the tidal wave of challenges they face, are fundamentally kind. This is hard to describe, but life in Iraq was the first time in my adult life where I existed outside of the direct confines of capital and its socially warping power. Iraq has a high trust Islamic society, where petty crime is almost unheard of, and the generosity of everyone I met made Iraq a truly magical place.

Iraq is also a place riddled with contradictions. By the end of my time, I had become quite jaded with the place, with a friend describing my writings similar to a "bitter secularist." I had taken to calling foreigners the corpse washers of Iraq, noting how the climate disaster combined with poor governance and a demographic explosion was leading up to a catastrophe. With the beauty of distance, I no longer think this. I think that there continues to remain hope for Iraq, but the window is closing fast.

Masgouf, a classic Iraqi dish composed of a split carp grilled over a fire.