By Jamie Watt
When Erbil International Airport suspended flights on July 21, I checked the departures board the way you check on a friend in the hospital. Iranian drones had come in over the city that morning. Air defense intercepted six around the airport and four more over the American consulate. One came down near the runway. The fire was contained. Nobody was killed.
Within hours, the flights resumed.
After the better part of a decade in Erbil, I still have not learned to do what my neighbors do. That morning I refreshed news sites until my eyes hurt. The shops in my area opened at the usual time. The man checking me out at the market shrugged when I asked about the night before, then asked if I wanted the same as always.
I want to be honest about what this summer has cost, because everyone here has lived through it. Since the war began at the end of February, the Kurdistan Region has been struck by at least 904 drones and missiles. Twenty-nine people have been killed and 138 wounded. In April a drone killed a married couple in their home. Erbil has had drones overhead on eleven straight nights. No honest optimism can skip past those numbers.
Hold them against that shrug at the market and it can look like denial. For my first years here I believed it was. Being wrong about that has taught me more than anything else I have learned in this country.
My Kurdish neighbors are not calm because they are unbothered. They are calm because they carry a longer memory than mine, one that taught them the difference between a hard season and the end of things. Men my age here grew up in the shadow of Anfal. Their parents walked into the mountains in 1991 with what they could carry. In 2014 they watched an army of fanatics come within an hour’s drive of this city, and they did not leave. They held. Missiles fell on Erbil neighborhoods in 2022, and again in 2024.
I was here for some of this. My calm, when I manage it, is borrowed from these neighbors. Theirs was earned, and it is not denial. It is something closer to expertise. They have run this calculation many times, and they know roughly how it comes out.
The airport deserves the same reading. It would be easy to call a same-day reopening bravado. It was a procedure. Reopening an international airport hours after debris falls near the runway takes people who wrote the plan and rehearsed it, air defense that worked, an honest damage assessment, and ground crews who showed up anyway. Fifteen years ago that capacity did not exist here. It exists now because people built it.
Kurdistan is doing more than getting through this summer. It is running institutions through it.
Two days after the airport closed and reopened, the Kurdistan Regional Government announced that investment in the Region had passed twenty-five billion dollars. This month a license was issued for a cable car on Gara Mountain in Duhok, which is not a project you approve if you have stopped believing in next year. I wrote in these pages earlier this month about the generators disappearing from our streets under the Runaki program. That rollout has not paused either. It absorbed a war and kept moving, which is what the airport did on a shorter clock.
Building during, rather than after. A place learns to do that once it understands that waiting for perfect conditions means waiting forever.
I still flinch when I hear an interception. But what I have taken from this summer is smaller and more useful than optimism. Keeping going is a skill. This city has been practicing it far longer than I have lived here, and it shows in ordinary things: shops that open, cranes that turn, lights that stay on, flights that land. What I feel watching it is respect, and a quiet confidence that when this season ends, and it will end, the work here will pick up exactly where it left off.