BAGHDAD – Twenty years ago, on the 20th of March 2003, the United States, along with the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland, invaded Iraq, claiming they were going in to destroy weapons of mass destruction. These were ultimately never found, but the 20 years of fighting that followed caused Iraq to spiral into chaos and put in motion a chain of events that saw an explosion of sectarian violence and a huge rise in the number and power of jihadi militias and armed groups.

The impact upon Iraq and its people has been utterly devastating. Over the past 20 years, more than 207,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by fighting, and some 9 million have been forced to flee or migrate from their homes. 

The invasion meant that Iraq, which was reeling from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, became entangled with new challenges brought by political division, sectarian conflict, endemic corruption, and a deadly power struggle to control the country’s oil riches.

VICE World News went to Iraq to meet and spend time with five young people born around the time of the invasion, whose lives bear the scars of 20 years of bitter conflict. These young adults are coming of age in a time marred by two decades of high tensions; some are hopeful, but many despair at the country’s endemic levels of corruption and the increasing influence of armed groups.

This is their story.

Explore Their Stories

Karim said she was admitted to school after five years of her family pleading with the education minister, and she described her early days in school as difficult because she was so much older than her peers. “Life for people like me is a bit extra difficult since there isn’t much dedicated to help us to move around,” she said.

“I was bullied in school and was looked upon as weak, which made me really shy and antisocial,” she added.

1.5 million people in Iraq are living with disabilities, one of the largest disabled populations in the world, part of the massive toll that decades of conflict have taken. However,  government support is limited to a monthly salary and only basic medical care.

The Iraqi government has made minimal effort to provide access to equal opportunities for people living with disabilities.

Despite the hardships and obstacles, Karim has found a passion for table tennis after it was recommended to her by a friend, and she is currently an athlete and a member of the young Iraqi Paralympic team.  She played in the Asia Youth Para Games in 2021 and won a silver medal.

“In 2018, I found out that there were sports for people like me, and at first I hesitated to go, but then my father convinced me, and I started playing table tennis,” she said.

“My trainer told me from the very early days, ‘Banin, you are a champion’, and I have got more ambitious after participating in the Asian competitions.”

Karim hopes with winning medals, she can grab the attention of the Iraqi government to take the issue of disabilities more seriously. “Because we got them all these medals, so I wish they'd pay attention to us and know of our difficulties, and do something about it,” she said.

ABDULRAHMAN

Haditha, Anbar, Iraq

In late February 2014, an ISIS suicide car bomb blew up Abdulrahman Said’s family guest house, killing his father and five of his cousins, an event that changed his life.

“The explosion threw me, all my clothes were burned, and my leg was injured, and I was covered in blood,” Said said.

“After my injury I left school, and the only thing that I wanted was revenge, and with a few friends, we used to make our way to the frontlines.”

Said, who was born on the 16th of June 2001, in the city of Haditha in the west of Iraq, is a member of the Jughayfa tribe. It’s one of the prominent tribes of the area, and has  more than 100,000 members. 

Haditha itself has been the site of major political upheaval and violence – including the Haditha massacre of 2005, in which US Marines killed unarmed Iraqi civilians. In 2014 it was the only town in Anbar that refused to surrender to ISIS’s rapid takeover of the province.

Said says that ISIS targeted his father – a leading figure in his tribe – because he refused to surrender to ISIS in early 2014, and since then, he has devoted himself to fighting the Islamist militants. Driven by vengeance, he said he wanted to pick up arms at the age of 13, and later joined the rank of his tribe’s armed group that fought ISIS for over three years, including an 18-month-long siege of Haditha between 2014 to 2017.

He is currently a member of the Haditha Brigade, a tribal militia of a few hundred men mainly from the Jughayfa tribe, which evolved out of the resistance against ISIS in 2014 and later merged under the Popular Mobilisation Forces, an umbrella organisation of paramilitary groups, including Iranian-backed troops.

He regularly visits the Haditha cemetery to pay his respects to his father and other soldiers killed fighting ISIS.

The battle against the remaining ISIS sleeper cells in the Anbar desert has been ongoing since late 2017, after the group was territorially defeated with the help of a US-led coalition providing air support.

Said got married in 2019, and he has two baby daughters. He says that he is enjoying the relative calm in the area and hopes for better times ahead if the situation remains peaceful.

"I didn't enjoy my childhood, but now I am trying my best to provide a different life for my daughters. I want to get them far from the reality we lived, and give them a happy life, the opposite of what we had," he said.

RAWAN

Erbil, Iraq

Rawan Salim’s whole life has been marked by political upheaval and activism. She was born in Libya on the 12th of September 2002 to a family that fled Iraq because of her father's political opposition to Saddam. Saddam’s regime arrested, tortured, and executed any political opponents outside the Baath party and killed more than 250,000 people during his rule, according to Human Rights Watch.

Salim and her family returned to Hillah, a small city in Babylon province in central Iraq, in 2003 with high hopes for living a normal life after the end of the dictatorship.

She developed a passion for the stage as a child, and took part in the local theatre and played piano. But later, activism marked her life that forced her and her family out of their hometown again.

Salim joined in with hundreds of other young people who poured onto the streets across the country in October 2019 in popular youth-led demonstrations that called for better living conditions and jobs, known in Iraq as the October Revolution. Salim campaigned in her hometown and later in Baghdad working as a spokesperson for the protests.

Her outspokenness during the protests led to threats from Shia armed groups dominant in the area. In central and southern parts of Iraq, the Iranian-backed militia groups have accumulated an immense influence and power in the past decade, and they act as the de facto powerbroker, and with thousands of armed men at their disposal, any kind of opposition to their rule is crushed. Once again, Salim’s family was forced to seek safety in Sulaymaniyah, a city in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

Salim was undeterred and continued her activism.

Salim credits her “stubbornness and determination” for better days in Iraq to a generational disparity on their access to information by young people on what’s going on in the country. Her dedication to her activism has also led to her involvement in 964, a local media start-up where she prepares and presents cultural and social programmes on digital platforms. She is in her first year of studying at the international relations department at university in Erbil.

“They call us the ‘PUBG generation,’” she said, a reference to the PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds video game. “But I think the difference is clear that our generation has had enough, and is asking: ‘If there is a good life, why aren’t we living it?’,” she said.

BAQIR

Sadr City, Baghdad, Iraq

Baqir Furqan lives in extreme poverty and hardship in Sadr City, a suburb of Baghdad often referred to as a slum. Built for the city's poorest residents decades ago, Sadr City has long been a symbol of inequality and neglect. Despite their hardships, Furqan's family has called this neighbourhood home for over two generations – a grey-looking, two-storey house on the corner of grid line sections of Sadr City.

Furqan was born on the 9th of April 2003, on the night that Baghdad fell to US forces. Despite the chaos, a midwife was found to help with the birth. One year later, in May, Furqan's father, Furqan, who had joined the ranks of a newly formed Shia armed group fighting foreign troops called the Mahdi army, was killed in a firefight with American forces around the corner from his grandfather’s house.

“Growing up without a father is pretty difficult,” he said. “But I have grown up among my kin just fine.”

Despite this loss, Furqan persevered, quitting school at 12, and taking on various jobs to support himself and his family. Today, he is a mechanic and deeply committed to his father’s legacy. He says that he was the “real Sadrist,” a faction led by Muqtada Sadr, a Shia clergyman popular among Shia Muslims for his speeches calling for being more “patriotic,” as opposed to other Shia groups backed by neighbouring Iran.

Sadr City, with its crowded streets and sprawling slums, is a neighbourhood that has seen its fair share of hardship and conflict.

“Sadr City is a crazy place, you hear gunfire every night, and it is always like: ‘That person got shot, and that got into a fight.’ It is a madhouse,” he said after a few rounds were fired nearby.

Furqan holds his late father in high esteem and regards him as a hero who lost his life while fighting against US forces. “Visiting his grave brings me peace,” he told VICE World News. He visits his father's grave every Thursday and offers prayers for his soul.

As the son of a martyr, Furqan receives a monthly salary of 70,000 Iraqi dinars ($50) from the Sadr-movement-affiliated organisation dedicated to the families of their fallen members.

Left with low hopes for the current leaders of Sadrists, a large faction in the Iraqi government with influence and power over the Iraqi government, Furqan said:

“The true Sadrists are the ones who sacrificed their lives for us, but the ones working for the movement these days are a bunch of thieves who only think of their own pockets.”

KHALED

Hawija, Iraq

Born in Hawija, Kirkuk, in 2003, Khaled's life has been marked by the rise and fall of Sunni jihad groups and ISIS. Despite being just 15, Khaled – whose name has been changed for his safety – was convicted of association with ISIS by the Kurdish authorities in Erbil in 2018.

“I was transferred to the juvenile department for investigation, and they asked me why I hadn’t fled the training camps of ISIS, and I told them everything. Later in court, I was sentenced to five and a half months, and then I was released from prison,” he said.

After being released from Erbil’s juvenile prison in 2019, he was relocated to a displacement camp in Dibaga, and later moved to Hassan Sham camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Mosul, a tent camp with a population of 6,000 that mainly hosts people from the areas controlled by ISIS and who now fear retribution.

Khaled has spent his last five years in a special section of the camp with a few dozen other ISIS ex-convicts awaiting a path to reconciliation and return to their hometowns. “The biggest problem is Shia militias. Even if I have served my jail time, they’ll come and possibly kill me,” he said. People in small towns and villages affected by ISIS’s brutal reign refuse to accept anyone who was associated with the Islamist group.

Khaled’s father joined ISIS in 2014.  “My father was a member of the Iraqi federal police force, but when ISIS came, I think he fell for their soft approach during their early days, and he and my brother joined them,” he said.

Khaled claims that he was left with no choice but to join the training camps dedicated to grooming young children to become future fighters. During ISIS’s rule, hundreds of children from villages and towns in the vast Ninewa plains were forced to enrol in classes to learn about jihad and weapons to prepare them for the future as fighters for the so-called caliphate between 2014 to 2017.

Some of these children were caught during operations led by the international anti-ISIS coalition, and Khaled was arrested during the liberation operations of Hawija.

“I was relieved that I didn’t get killed because ISIS told anyone who surrenders will be killed, but that wasn’t the case,” he said.

Despite the fact he was a minor at the time and he has already served his prison sentence, he still faces the possibility of another 15-to-20-year sentence for membership in ISIS handed down by Iraq's federal courts. The fear of retribution from those who lost loved ones to ISIS also remains a major concern for Khaled.

Stuck in limbo, Khaled's journey through conflict, prison, rejection, and fear of retribution is likely to last longer.

Iraq is struggling with countless problems like high unemployment, endemic corruption, and increasing power of armed groups. People like Khaled remain at the very bottom of the country’s list of priorities.

Photography and Cinematography: Daniel Vergara 

Edited by: Helen Nianias

Production Credits: Andrew McClure, Lee Misenheimer, Andy Nicholl, Beatriz Azevedo