Diagnosing the Condition of Iraq: The Web View

Introduction

Five years after the start of the shock and awe campaign by U.S. and allied forces in Iraq, the daily news is grim and media fatigue of a kind is beginning to set in. The efforts made to retell the Iraq story, emanating from U.S. think tanks and the occasional Republican presidential hopeful, strive to diagnose an Iraqi societal condition that separates itself from 'media'. Here, however, the endeavor is to look at the everyday life in Iraq not from the street walk-through and the shaking camera as the evidence of what's really going on. Rather, the Web becomes the platform for a diagnosis. How well, or poorly, Iraq is portrayed is a self-portrait. Do Iraqi Web people and institutions -- from the governmental, commercial and non-governmental webmasters to the bloggers and other identifiable sites from the ground in Iraq -- exhibit measurable behaviors of life carrying on? What does the liveliness and lifespan of Iraqi Web spaces tell us about the state of Iraq? The analysis concerns three periods of the Iraqi Web: pre-war (with one state provider and the intriguing iraq2000.com by Saddam's brother) to the mid-war expansion of official sites to .org's and .com's and, finally, to the current period, with Iraq in possession and using its own .iq domain. Using historical Web 'footage' (traces), together with standard Web-state forensic metrics, the study has found a fragmented, shattered and isolated webspace, lacking interconnectivity of the different webspheres and characterized by an anachronistic forms of code and design.

Both before and during the war, the small number of Iraqi Websites is striking. During Saddam's regime, the one state provider Uruknet lists a handful of Iraqi sites, all of governmental bodies and state-owned oil companies. After the collapse of the former Iraqi regime, partial traces of these websites can be found on the Internet Archive, and in nostalgic recollections of former Iraqi forums. With the new registration of the .iq domain in 2004, and its use in practice since 2005, the expectation of the newly formed (web)statehood on the ruins of the former one is not yet met, as all .iq sites can be fetched in one search engine query, most of the hits still consist of either (new) governmental or commercial Iraqi websites. Other webspheres, representing other sectors of the Iraqi society (civil society, academia, personal websites) are hosted elsewhere (if at all). Similarly, whilst the .com.iq and .gov.iq subdomain exist, there is no subdomain dedication for civil society organisations (.org.iq) or academia (there is only one.edu.iq site,for the Iraqi Commision for Computers and Informatics).

The state of the Iraqi academia, as represented on the Web, is that of a collapsing education system. Many of the Iraqi universities do not have a website, whilst some universities that did have a website in the past (such as the University of Baghdad, 2004), have ceased to maintain their websites on the Web and their former domains have been bought by commercial domain utilizers.

There is no evident interlinkage between the Iraqi webspheres, (news, blogs, governmental sites). The isolation of the Iraqi Web is also evident by the lack of backlinks to Iraqi websites from elsewhere on the Web.

The study concludes with a hopeful note, by highlighting the importance of the flourishing Iraqi blogosphere both within Iraq and in the diaspora. These blogs, both intended for a local audience (in Arabic, mostly hosted in maktoobblog.com) and for a Western audience (in English, mostly hosted in Blogger), seem to form the only representation of the Iraqi society on the Web, describing the lives of Iraqis (both in Iraq and in the diaspora), their aspirations about future statehood and their recollections of the past. Iraqi bloggers seem to consciously assume the role of reporting the world what is really happening in Iraq. Their high level of interlinkage indicates both a tight community, as well as Web-literacy that is not evident elsewhere on the Iraqi Web. In a sense, the state of Iraq is alive on the Web as long as it is being blogged.

Screenshot set of .iq web

.iq web in 18 seconds - Animated gif

404void

Data

About Iraqi web

• The internet under Saddam
• The new Iraqi media law: who controls the controllers?

Iraq web sites

• URLsIQ (.iq sites url list)
• BacklinksCountryIQ (backlinks Google and domain country all .iq sites)
• NonIQsites (non .iq sites url list)
• Thuraya - Apparently provides Internet access for US Troops in Iraq (name seems to be changed to TS2)

The absence of .org.iq.

* google search site:.org.iq:

• www.iraq2000.com wayback machine:
  

-- Main.esther - 21 Aug 2007

• absence of Saddam in .iq:
  

• issuecrawler map .iq sites:
  

• issuecrawler non-iq sites iraq:
  

• issuecrawler iraq .iq and non-.iq:
  

• Delicious related tags iraq 28aug07:
  

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