Jamie Watt
In November 2024, a young Kurdish man came to our door in Erbil with a census form. He was one of more than 120,000 enumerators working across Iraq that week. I answered his questions in Kurdish. He did the tally and worked out that my family was not local.
It was the first census to cover every province in Iraq since 1987. The 1997 count left out Erbil, Duhok and Sulaimani altogether. A curfew kept most cars off the roads for two days. Not everything stopped, but enough did that it had a mild Covid-lockdown feel.
I treated it as two slow days and a form to fill out. I was wrong. Less than a point and a half from that count now decides whether a trillion dinars or more reaches the people around me.
In February, Iraq’s own federal Ministry of Planning said the raw census data put the Kurdistan Region at 14.14 percent of Iraq’s population. The figure Baghdad has adopted is 12.68 percent. The ministry says the gap comes from two adjustments. It excluded foreign nationals in every province, and it applied a migration formula that counted some of the Region’s residents by where they lived before they moved here. The Kurdistan Regional Government rejects the lower figure and wants 14.14 percent used for the 2027 federal budget, which is still being negotiated.
Sirwan Mohammed, the KRG’s deputy minister of planning, put a price on the difference. On a budget of 100 trillion dinars, he said, the lower share would mean “an annual loss of approximately 1.5 trillion dinars.” That money pays teachers, doctors and the other salaries families here plan their months around.
I have no complaint about the first adjustment. I am a guest in this country, and foreigners were left out in every province, not just in Erbil.
The second adjustment is harder for me to accept, because of men like Wesam.
Wesam is my electrician. He comes from central Iraq and has lived and worked in Erbil for five years. He is honest and good at his job. When something in our house stops working, I call him. Over the years he and I have built up a set of inside jokes that come out whenever he is working in our house.
He is far from unusual. I know many Iraqis from other provinces who own businesses in Erbil or work here. They came for work, for school, for a business that could grow. They drive these roads, use these hospitals and draw power from this grid. Their children study here.
These are the people a migration formula is built to move. When it counts them by where they used to live, the budget for the services they use follows them back to a province they left. They stay in Erbil in person and leave it on paper.
A city’s population is the people who live in it. Iraq waited nearly four decades for a full count. Erbil is full of people from all over Iraq, and a few of us from much farther away, who chose to build their lives here. That choice is a sign of what the Region has built, and it belongs in the numbers.
The young man at my door did his job well. He wrote down who was actually in the house. Baghdad can do the same with the numbers he and thousands like him collected.
Tomorrow Wesam will be in someone’s house in Erbil with his toolbag, getting the lights back on.