In this essay, the author writes about protest as inheritance. Beginning with a childhood memory of protest, she traces how the Iraq war came to shape the way she sees the world, where Iraq returns, again and again, in every injustice that follows.

Alan Kurdi (born Shenu), the Syrian Kurdish boy who drowned crossing the Mediterranean in 2015, died at the same age I was being pushed through central London in a pram during protests against the war on Iraq. Growing up, I grappled with a haunting question: why did I get to ride in a buggy, but he rode in an inflatable boat?

Although my mum, as with most Iraqis of her generation, always cautioned me against engaging in politics outside of our home, her actions occasionally undercut her own advice. While I was still being pushed in a pram, she took me with her to the Stop the War protests against the invasion of Iraq in London in the spring of 2003.[1]

Although I don’t remember the moment clearly, I have come to understand it as a formative experience that must have lodged itself in my subconscious, and would later shape how I came to reckon with the Iraq War’s enduring legacy. More vivid to me than the sounds or the space of the protest was the sense of overwhelming sadness, which I would witness time and again whenever we watched the news about Iraq in the years thereafter.

Born with British-Iraqi-Irish heritage, the Iraq War was impossible to escape because its reverberations have never ended. It has shaped the political landscape that followed, in ways that perhaps only people with Iraqi roots are attentive to. Iraq lingered in conversations, in headlines, and in political discourse, its violence returning despite the distance in time and space from the invasion.

Stop the War protest, 2003. Image courtesy of the author.

Throughout my adolescence, the so-called “migrant crisis” dominated the front pages of Britain’s racist media – an obsession that began in 2014 and has only intensified since then, manifesting today in a relentless tirade against “small boats” and “asylum hotels”. Although these refugees were represented variously as a “swarm”, an “invasion”, or a “threat” to Britain’s demography, in every face, I could only see Iraqis fleeing the war. I understood clearly that, in another timeline, these refugees could all have been me – and that for many British people, humanity was conditional on the lottery of birth.

In the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, the bigoted UK ‘Independence’ Party (UKIP) posted a leaflet through our front door. Printed on it was a map, where the only countries labelled were the UK, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.

The message was unambiguous: it was not Europeans that these racists hated, but the Iraqis who should be dutifully condemned to stay in Iraq – to be killed by British bomb or American bullet, rather than allowed to build a life in Britain. I understood then that their hatred for Iraqis ran so deep that they would sacrifice their benefits from the European Union simply for the chance to rid themselves of people like us, undesirable and disposable.

In 2017, I sat in a Politics lesson as my teacher insisted that the Iraq War was actually a good thing, because Saddam was a monster and “we” had brought “democracy” to Iraq. Behind me in the classroom in serene Surrey stood an almost life-size cardboard cut-out of war criminal Tony Blair, his eyes burning holes into my back week after week. For my teacher, he was the best Prime Minister the UK had ever had.

The seed of protest, first planted in my subconscious memories of protesting the Iraq War, began to germinate. Though we had grown up being told not to speak about politics outside the house, I could not sit silently as these warmongering narratives were indoctrinated into my classmates, unchallenged.

I spoke back, only to be dismissed as “emotional” and “angry”. I was underprepared to argue with someone forty years my senior, who spoke about Iraq with less outrage than when I failed to hand in my homework. Still, for the next two years, I would revive our argument whenever Iraq was mentioned, to the palpable boredom of my classmates, who would roll their eyes: here we go again.

This same teacher later justified the use of torture through a hypothetical ticking-time bomb scenario, aptly framed to strike fear into impressionable students. In my mind, the bombs exploded not in theory but in Baghdad, and the torture was not fictional but photographed in Abu Ghraib.

I protested that torture could only be supported by those who would never be subjected to it, never brutalised and beaten simply for the crime of being Iraqi; I was unconvincing, apparently.

As I grew older, the enduring presence of the Iraq War made protest the compass of my everyday life. I attended court hearings in London where Iraqis brought cases against the Ministry of Defence for British soldiers’ crimes in Iraq. At Durham University, I was constantly debating, determined that the next time I encountered someone like my politics teacher, I would be able to hold my own. I wrote incessantly about Iraq in essays and my dissertation on US violence during the Iraq War, intent upon acquiring the knowledge, logic, and language to articulate what I already knew to be true.

In every injustice, I saw Iraq.

Image courtesy of the author.

In 2021, when protests were staged around the UK against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah and bombardment of the occupied Gaza Strip, I felt an obligation to attend. The footage of Israeli bombs raining on Gaza collapsed time and space, resurrecting U.S. bombs over Baghdad, and pulling the past forcefully into the present.

Two years later, Israel’s genocide and siege of the Gaza Strip revived Iraq once more. It felt nauseating to witness familiar patterns of Western media manufacturing consent for Arabs’ slaughter, sanitising violence and legitimising massacre. Images of starved, gaunt Palestinians trapped under Israeli blockade traced the shape of Iraqis starved under years of sanctions.

Taking to the streets for Palestine in the months since has felt like a public expression of a way of life already practised, where protest is a daily discipline. At the million-man protest against genocide in London, my mum and I returned to the streets together, except this time, we walked side by side.

As Palestinians live-streamed their annihilation to the world, I couldn’t help but imagine how the killing of over a million Iraqis from spring 2003 to summer 2007 would have looked in the digital age. How many faces, how many stories, and how many massacres were erased without testimony? The absence of witnessing felt like another haunting form of violence.

The following year, when I joined university encampments against the genocide, my point of historical reference was not the anti-Vietnam War protests in the U.S., but Brian Haw’s one-man peace camp outside the Houses of Parliament from 2001 to 2011, in protest of the British government’s violence in Iraq. When asked how long he would continue his demonstration, he replied: “As long as it takes. When do you give up on the kids?”. Participating in the encampments felt like a revival of that legacy – a continuation of protest rooted in opposition to the war that shaped my political consciousness, and an affirmation that our protests against injustice would continue for as long as it takes.

“As long as it takes” monument in Parliament Square, London by Gabby Samara. Image courtesy of the author.

This year, as the U.S. attacked Iran under similar pretences of weapons of mass destruction and colonial notions of liberation, the inherited sense of responsibility to protest colonial violence has felt sharper than ever. Each return to the streets has felt dutifully cyclical, carrying my connection to Iraq into the present moment as it continues to shape how I relate to injustice across the region.

Although borne from personal experience, having the Iraq War at the centre of my political consciousness is not unique. For many people of Iraqi heritage living in the UK, protest has become a cornerstone of our connection to Iraq.

This collective consciousness finds expression not just in our marches but in our art, from the lyrics of British-Iraqi rapper Lowkey’s songs, to the words of Jasmine Naziha Jones’ play Baghdaddy, and the artwork of my sister Gabby Samara. These forms of political, protest art capture the sentiments of a generation for whom the Iraq War is continually revived and embodied throughout our lives – privately and publicly, as individuals and as collectives.

23 years on, the Iraq War did not end. It became the frame of reference through which many of us move through the world, returning cyclically in moments of defiance. Our protests inscribe memory, anger, and an enduring sense of responsibility to those killed in Iraq in 2003 and the years that followed. In times like these, when history feels dangerously repetitive, their deaths haunt and compel us to act more than ever. The Iraq War, and all its victims, live on in our political consciousness and our protests.

This piece is part of a special edition marking the 2003 US-led war on Iraq.