IRAQ

Iraq's men have experienced more war than any living population on earth. A man born in Baghdad in 1970 has lived through the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the Gulf War (1990-1991), sanctions (1991-2003), the US invasion (2003), the sectarian civil war (2006-2008), and the ISIS war (2014-2017). He has never known sustained peace, and the expectation to be strong through all of it — to fight, to flee, to rebuild, to fight again — has created a masculine psychology of permanent hypervigilance that no system has attempted to address.

The ISIS occupation created a specific male trauma: in Mosul, Fallujah, and Tikrit, men faced a binary — submit to ISIS rule and participate in their system, or resist and face execution. The men who lived under ISIS carry the complex guilt of survival by compliance, and the men who fought against them — in the Iraqi army, the Peshmerga, or the Popular Mobilization Forces — carry combat trauma on top of the accumulated trauma from previous wars. The sectarian dimension means that Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish men carry different versions of the same national trauma, and the political system ensures they process it separately if they process it at all. Iraq's oil wealth flows through a corruption pipeline that produces millionaire politicians and jobless young men — a combination that generates the rage currently fueling both protests and militia recruitment.