Baghdad

The Economist called Baghdad 'the world's surprise boomtown' — and the surprise is that a city bombed, sanctioned, occupied, and sectarian-cleansed across three decades is now attracting $7 billion in Qatari real estate deals and $3 billion in Saudi investment. A city of roughly 9 million people in a country where 91% of government revenue comes from oil, Baghdad is both the capital of the world's fifth-largest proven oil reserves and a case study in what happens when an economy cannot metabolise its own wealth.

The Abbasid Caliphs founded Baghdad in 762 AD as a deliberately planned circular city — the Round City of Peace — at the point where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run closest together. For five centuries it was the intellectual capital of the world: the House of Wisdom translated Greek philosophy, Indian mathematics, and Persian astronomy into Arabic, creating the knowledge base that Europe later imported during the Renaissance. The Mongol sack of 1258 destroyed the city and its irrigation canals, beginning a decline that lasted until the British Mandate created modern Iraq in 1920 with Baghdad as its capital.

What Wikipedia underplays is the depth of Baghdad's oil addiction. Iraq produces roughly 4 million barrels per day, but its refining capacity was so damaged by decades of conflict that until recently it imported gasoline, diesel, and kerosene — a country floating on oil that could not process its own fuel. In 2025, Iraq announced self-sufficiency in refined petroleum products for the first time. Meanwhile, the 'Development Road' mega-project aims to build a rail and highway corridor from the new Al-Faw Grand Port in Basra through Baghdad to Turkey, positioning Iraq as a land bridge between the Persian Gulf and Europe.

The country's median age is 21. Its population of 47 million grows at 2% annually. Non-oil GDP growth limps at 3-4% despite massive demographic tailwinds, because the public sector absorbs talent that the private sector cannot employ — a classic resource curse where oil revenue funds government jobs that compete with productive employment. Baghdad's economy mirrors an organism running on a single metabolic pathway: extraordinarily efficient when the input flows, catastrophically vulnerable when it doesn't. A 2025 oil discovery of 2 billion barrels in the East Baghdad field only deepens the dependency.

The biological parallel is acute: Baghdad operates like an obligate parasite — entirely dependent on a single host resource, with atrophied capacity to feed itself any other way.