n the southern city of Amarah, a grandfather tells his grandson stories of the 1920 Revolution — a religiously charged narrative about how men from different tribes to defend their faith and dignity. In Nineveh, in north-western Iraq, the same event is remembered differently: as an Arab nationalist uprising led by tribal resistance against British colonial rule. In Sulaymaniyah, in the north, the revolution barely registers in the collective memory as history begins elsewhere — with experiences of mountain resistance, the formation of the Peshmerga (Kurdish armed forces), and later the atrocities of Anfal and Halabja.
According to historian Charles Tripp in A History of Iraq, the 1920 Revolution was framed primarily as a religious movement in Shia Arab areas, particularly Najaf and Karbala. It drew on a fatwa issued by Sayyid Mohammad Al-Shirazi prohibiting the election of a non-Muslim ruler, mobilising tribes such as Bani Hakim, Bani Malik, and Al-Gharraf. In this narrative, the revolution appears less as a political struggle, and more as a religious cry against injustice.
In Iraq’s western region, where Sunni Arab communities live, the narrative shifts. There, the revolution is remembered as a national Arab movement against British colonialism. In cities such as Mosul, Fallujah, and Ramadi, the conflict centered on who had the right to govern and administer the state, rather than on religious or doctrinal grounds.
From a Kurdish perspective, however, the 1920 Revolution is seen as an exclusively Arab event, with no resonance in Kurdish identity. Its narratives hold little space in Erbil or Sulaymaniyah. Kurdish political memory instead begins with uprisings in the 1930s and 1940s, led by Sheikh Mahmoud Al-Hafid, demanding autonomy and independence.
From that moment on, a fundamental problem emerged: Iraqi collective memory was built around three distinct narratives rather than a single collective memory.
One hundred years after the founding of the Iraqi state, national identity remains fractured, shaped by competing memories in the south, west, and north rather than a shared national narrative.
The modern Iraqi state was founded in 1921 under British mandate, which drew clear geographic borders that unified territory but not memory. Iraqi identity remained suspended — unfinished in form and substance — even after a century of institutional development.
King Faisal I, Iraq’s first monarch, noted in his memoirs that the Iraqi nation was “incomplete in its formation,” underscoring how state-building preceded identity-building.
Constructivism: Identity shaped by memory, not a constitution
Alexander Wendt, the leading theorist of constructivism, argues that states do not possess fixed identities; they construct them through social interaction. Identity cannot be imposed through law alone; it is built through shared symbols, songs, stories, and customs that form a common ground for belonging.
Iraq’s first constitution, the 1925 Basic Law, formally prohibited ethnic, sectarian, and religious discrimination. Yet discrimination persisted, feeding fragmented memories.
In the south, collective memory was shaped by Ashura rituals, mourning practices, and images of martyrs — producing a sustained sense of political grievance reinforced by state marginalisation.
In Iraq’s western regions, collective memory was long shaped by military service and the cultivation of state authority — through enlistment in the army and ties to Arab tribes across the region. After 2003, however, this memory was recast as one of displacement and ruined cities.
In the north, memory took shape on mountain peaks and in Kurdish songs steeped in stories of resistance, oppression, and the Anfal campaign.
These memories were not peripheral. They became foundational, shaping identity. From a constructivist perspective, identities repeated within popular memory crystallise into political realities — even when they contradict the state’s official narrative.
As a result, a unified Iraqi identity could not emerge in the absence of a central, shared memory. While the language of the state speaks of “one people,” collective memory continues to reflect the existence of three peoples, each with a different worldview.
When the state writes memory — and memory writes itself
When the Baath Party came to power, it relied on the 1970 interim Constitution, which proclaimed unity, freedom, and socialism as guiding principles. In practice, however, the regime sought to impose a single official memory through anthems, monuments, festivals, and nationalist rhetoric. The slogan “One Arab Nation with an Immortal Mission” competed with the existence of a Kurdish national identity and repressed Shia Arab identity.
This attempt to enforce unity through authoritarian means lacked any inclusive vision capable of addressing historical injustices experienced by different communities. Thus, this nation rose not through shared conviction or belonging, but through the force of the gun. Shia religious rituals were violently suppressed, Kurds were systematically persecuted and banned from speaking their language, and Sunnis who challenged the regime were imprisoned. Iraq fractured into two parallel realities: the Iraq of the state, imposed through coercion, and the Iraq of society, shaped by repression, mistrust, and fragmentation.
Iraq’s political system has embedded sectarian and ethnic memories into governance, turning identity into political currency and preventing the emergence of a unified sense of citizenship.
1991: the collapse of the center, the rise of the margins
After Iraq’s major defeat in Kuwait in 1991, the state’s ability to produce meaning collapsed. Society retreated into fragmented memories, aligning with three separate narratives.
This shift aligns with center-periphery theory, which explains how weakening central authority allows sub-identities to dominate.
In the south, memories of repression were revived after the crushing of the Shaabaniya uprising. In the north, the establishment of the Kurdistan Parliament in 1992 marked the birth of a new political memory, partially liberated from Baghdad’s control. The central narrative survived mainly in Baghdad and Sunni-majority areas, suffocated by economic sanctions.
Iraq thus entered a phase where sub-identities became functional alternatives to a national identity, following the failure of the state to sustain a collective sense of belonging.
2003: the fall of the state, the rise of memory
The US-led invasion of 2003 did not only dismantle the regime; it also destroyed the coercive authority that had enforced a single narrative. Suppressed memories surged to the surface and transformed into political narratives.
The Shia community saw governance as their rightful turn after decades of exclusion. Sunnis entered a period of fear and loss of power. Kurds consolidated their autonomous identity and sought to insulate the region from the conflicts of the central and southern parts of the country. These positions draw on the theory of collective memory, which argues that groups do not recall the past as it unfolded, but as it serves their present needs.
The post-2003 system of sectarian power-sharing political system (muhasasa) did more than distribute authority among Iraq’s main groups. It embedded fragmented memories directly into the structure of the state.
What was presented as a mechanism of reassurance — allocating power and representation to each “component” — instead turned collective memory into political currency.
Shia memory was recast as entitlement, Sunni memory as grievance, and Kurdish memory as a hard-won right rooted in self-determination. Iraq had entered a new phase: identity not as belonging, but as political share.
The fragility of this arrangement became clear in 2006, following the bombing of the Al-Askari shrine in Samarra. The state proved unable to contain the violence or preserve social trust in the absence of a shared national identity. Within months, Baghdad ceased to function as a single, shared city. It was reshaped into a map of fear, with neighbourhoods re-organised along sectarian lines.
Cleavage theories suggest that societies burdened by unresolved collective trauma can slide rapidly into identity-based violence once a triggering event occurs. In Iraq, that trigger ignited the sectarian war of 2006–2008. Memory was no longer something narrated after the fact; it became a condition of survival.
Media and memory: when discourse becomes a map of identity
After 2003, Iraq’s collective memories were shaped not only by fear of the other, but by media ecosystems that reproduced sharply fragmented visions of the country. Television channels, newspapers, and digital platforms became tools for reinforcing distinct narratives, each reflecting the political and social position of its audience.
From the 2006 civil war to ISIS and the authorities’ response to the 2019 protest movement, unresolved collective trauma and fragmented media narratives continue to reproduce Iraq’s divided identity.
Media outlets aligned with Shia political parties foregrounded stories of martyrdom, ritual, and religious symbolism — exemplified by channels such as Karbala, Al-Ahd, Al-Ghadeer, and Al-Furat. Channels funded by Sunni political actors in western Iraq focused instead on marginalisation, displacement, military operations, and opposition to central authority, including Al-Fallujah, Al-Rafidain, Al-Baghdadia, and Samarra TV. Kurdish media based in the Kurdistan Region centered narratives of national oppression: Halabja, the Anfal campaign, Peshmerga resistance, and territorial claims in places like Kirkuk and Sinjar, through outlets such as Kurdistan TV, KurdSat, Rudaw, and K24.
This media landscape did not merely reflect memory — it actively produced and sustained it. In divided societies, media often deepens fragmentation rather than repairing it. Each political crisis, amplified through partisan coverage, reactivated and reshaped these three identities for public consumption. The result was a cycle repeated with every election, every budget negotiation, and every attempt to form a government.
ISIS: one war, three memories
When ISIS seized nearly a third of Iraq in 2014, Iraqis fought a single war — yet still emerged with three distinct memories that overlapped only in name. In the south, the dominant narrative centered on sacrifice and martyrdom within the Popular Mobilisation Forces. In the west, memory was shaped by displacement, absence, and the destruction of cities. In the north, the war was remembered as one of self-defence and territorial expansion into areas claimed as historically Kurdish.
Rather than producing a shared national reckoning, the war deepened existing fractures: Shia resistance versus Shia civic identity; Sunni displacement versus Sunni terrorism; Kurdish self-defence versus accusations of separatism. These memories did not converge into a renewed national identity. Instead, they reinforced a society living three different wars within the same conflict.
October 2019: an interrupted attempt at a new memory
A new generation, largely untouched by Baathist repression, the 1991 uprising, or even the legacy of the 1920 revolt, came of age witnessing a single reality: the post-2003 political system’s failure to provide basic services and needs. From this experience emerged an attempt to articulate a different memory — one not inherited, but lived.
What the ruling elite framed as a natural right to govern, rooted in demographic majority or historical grievance, this generation experienced as a renewed injustice imposed by the same system. This tension lay at the heart of the October 2019 protest movement (Tishreen). While Tishreen did not succeed in establishing a new, lasting collective memory, it did something unprecedented: it disrupted the monopoly of inherited narratives.
Protesters did not perceive the threat as coming from another sect or identity. The danger, instead, was the absence of a shared homeland — a sense of Iraqiness fractured by sectarian interests anchored in the three dominant memories. Their grievances were economic precarity, collapsing public services, declining education system, and an authoritarian political class that reproduced the very practices it once condemned under Baathist rule.
That rupture was met with familiar methods: live ammunition, tear gas, targeted killings, threats, and exclusion. In defending itself, the political system retreated to the protection of old memories, preserving them as sources of legitimacy. The Tishreen movement was eventually suffocated — weakened further by internal divisions, strategic errors, and shifting regional dynamics after 7 October. As the region entered a new geopolitical phase, factional narratives once again tightened their grip, fuelled by fear of what lay ahead.
A wide country, a narrow identity
A century after the founding of the modern Iraqi state, the contradiction remains stark. Geographically, Iraq is unified; socially and politically, it is fragmented.
In the south, identity is narrated through mourning and ritual. In the west, through fear, loss, and ruin. In the north, through nationalism and survival. These are not merely cultural differences, but coherent ideological systems sustained by networks of power and interest. The state, meanwhile, continues to invoke a singular national identity without possessing the tools to meaningfully construct it.
Iraq’s crisis today lies in this unresolved paradox: national identity is not an incomplete historical project — it is a project that has yet to begin. As a result, Iraqi identity remains narrower than the country itself, and the trench deeper than the shelter meant to protect all beneath it.
