Daesh (ISIS), Daesh and Daesh. That’s what Iraq is primarily in the news for nowadays as government and allied militia forces fight to take territory from the Islamic militant group, along with help from the US-led coalition and Iran. Possible independence of Iraqi Kurdistan and protests against the government of Haider al-Abadi make the news too, among other stories.
What doesn’t appear in the headlines is what Iraq used to look like before war plagued the country. Enter the Old Iraqi Pictures Twitter account, with its handle @IraqiPic. “Our country is the most beautiful,” reads the account description, and it has over 9,000 followers to date. @IraqiPic tweets daily pics of Iraqi life in the 20th century, including from the more peaceful time before the 1980 Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and the conflicts which followed. Iraq was quite the different place before then: a regional center of education, culture, medicine, etc. Take a look at some of the account’s most stunning images of Iraq’s past, courtesy of @IraqiPic.