Jamie Watt
I am writing this from a German cafe in the Golden Zone, and the language I hear most at the tables around me is English. Outside, a Syrian driver and an Iraqi employee sort out a delivery in it. Kurdish runs underneath it, Arabic beside it, and nobody here finds this strange.
A few weeks ago, at a cafe on Boulevard, I asked a young barista the question I have been asking here for years. Where are you from?
Here, he said.
Call him Ziad. He was born in Erbil in 2004, a few years after his family arrived from Baghdad. He is Arab, not Kurdish. He has never lived anywhere else.
For most of my years here, that question opened a story: Duhok, Qamishli, Baghdad, Tehran, Latakia, Sulaymaniyah. People came for work, for school, for a business that could grow. What Erbil offered was steady ground, and people build where the ground is steady. They are still coming.
Erbil governorate counted 541,500 people in the 1977 census. The 2024 census counted 2,517,534, nearly five times as many. No birth rate does that alone.
Migration for work and culture over the last fifteen years has built a new city alongside the old one.
Bear with me as I use two names for one place. “Erbil” is the city of people who came here for opportunity, centered on the areas of rapid development. “Hawler” is the Sorani city with deep roots, centered in the old neighborhoods. Two cities in one, overlapping and competing. Both belong.
Ziad is an Erbilian. Not a newcomer, not a Hawleri. The first generation of something else, carrying a family name from one place and a language from another.
I see it on a sports field every week. Our ultimate frisbee players come from Iran, Syria, Turkey, and across Kurdistan and Iraq. We have very few Hawleris. A new sport draws the curious and those who arrived without a network and need one. Erbil is full of both.
Go east or south of the center and the rhythm changes. These are the neighborhoods where families have lived on the same streets for generations, where everyone knows everyone, where your neighbor’s son’s wedding is your obligation too. The Kurdish spoken there is rich Sorani, thick with proverbs and family wisdom. Hospitality is not a service. It is the standard you are held to in “Hawler.”
Language taught me this before I understood it. I learned Kurdish in a small provincial town, which means I learned Behdini, then built a life in a Sorani city. Rather than switch, I stayed flexible: speaking Behdini, following enough Sorani, picking up Arabic phrases to make connections, using English in the professional world. “Hawler” is a bona fide Sorani city. “Erbil” is a whole other linguistic and ethnic being. Sorani, Arabic, Kurmanji, and English at one table, and the business still gets done. That is not confusion. It is capacity, and few cities in this region have it.
Neither city is enough on its own. An “Erbil” without “Hawler” would be prosperity with no memory: towers, franchises, and an identity borrowed from wherever the last investor flew in from. The fastest-built cities of the Gulf show remarkable skylines with only a shadow of rootedness beneath them.
A “Hawler” without “Erbil” would keep its memory and slowly lose its young people to other places and industries that offer opportunity. The city would give up the economic standing it has earned.
Taken together, they are something rarer: a city both rooted and open.
This region’s leaders have handled that balance well, and that is why it is working. The task ahead is to keep both moving hand in hand, so that what reaches the Golden Zone reaches Mantkawa too.
On a Thursday evening in Sami Abdulrahman Park, the grass fills with families and blankets. Boys play football with water bottles for goalposts. English drifts from one bench and Kurdish from the next. On one side of the park, skyscrapers go up. A short drive the other way, the citadel and the Qaysari Bazaar.
Two cities overlapping as one, and neither one whole without the other.