"Who are they? I asked. ‘Probably military intelligence,’ answered a visibly scared barber. ‘Or Sahwa,’ said his friend.
‘No, Sahwa only wear green camouflage uniforms– they must be the mujahideen,’ another man said. He was carrying a suitcase and planning to leave the city entirely.
‘Islamic State?’ suggested someone. ‘No, Islamic State fighters don’t wear shades,’ reasoned the barber.
‘No one knows. Everyone is a civilian and everyone is carrying weapons, you will never know,’ Suitcase Man retorted, before slamming the door of his car and making his escape."

This book is going to be on my top reads of the year - and it will be one I most recommend to those who want to see the world we all live in. Abdul-Ahad is a masterful writer, making what could be dry engaging and what could be devastating bearable. And in these 500 pages he covers the dissolution of a society, finishing on an exhausted, caveated ray of hope.
The writing shifts imperceptibly between modes - humour adorns, rather than saturates the book. Some chapters are heavy on exposition, others take a far more personal, journalistic tack. He takes his time - and while this is not a short book, it never feels long. 
And you get the sense that the last two decades haven't felt that long either. This is journalistic history, but Abdul-Ahad writes from research and experiences covering the conflict. He kicks the narrative off with his childhood memories of the Iran-Iraq war, his teenage experiences of the war in Kuwait follow and then the desperation of the sanction years, but the book mostly focuses on the period following the US invasion and fall of Saddam. 
This story is devastating not because of Abdul-Ahad hams it up, quite the contrary his writing style often, not always, pulls back from distressing detail. But rather because he shows a society riven by shock after shock - the collapse of the state, including all public services, the triumph of unbridled corruption, the transformation of a resistance into a sectarian, tribal civil war and, finally, the rise of ISIS following the collapse of the Arab Spring, and the following brutal, inhumane civil war, in which the formerly largely secular, tolerant population had all but disappeared into trauma-driven sadism and terror and tribal, local identification. 
Some of the most difficult details he saves for the Mosul ferry disaster of 2019 - unpacking how this accident is the inevitable result of the destruction of society, from the impossibly aged equipment, to the absence of public officials or trained personnel, to the rise of powerful religious militias, which owned the ferry and the island it was headed to. Just two years before they lost family members to the ferry, survivors had survived the public or private browsing mode executions of other family members in the hellhole that was living under ISIS.
Abdul-Ahad finishes with the 2019 and 2020 protest by the "PUBG generation". In the West, this refers to those who play a video game in which players try to survive random, constant attack in a ruined city world. For young Iraqis, Abdul-Ahad implies, the video game but is not needed. But these protests have some differences from the past. Like the Arab Spring, they have unprecedented participation and leadership from women. And unlike it, they are not calling for the toppling of a single dictator, but of an entire democratic overhaul. Chillingly as well as hopefully, as teenage war veterans, they have less naivety. A new way of being a nation, or possibly just a way of being a nation.
Abdul-Ahad's scepticism permeates these sections, but it can't quite squish his optimism, which given all he has seen, is really something.