In the years following the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, Cairo quietly became one of the largest homes for Iraqi refugees in the world. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis passed through the Egyptian capital during the 2000s, settling in apartments scattered across neighborhoods such as Nasr City and 6th of October. Unlike many other refugee crises, these Iraqis did not live in isolated refugee camps but instead occupied a more ambiguous social space as temporary residents in a vast transit city, waiting for interviews with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the possibility, however uncertain, of resettlement abroad. By 2007, an estimated two million Iraqis had fled the country and another two million were internally displaced, producing one of the largest refugee crises in the history of the modern Middle East.

Yet the upheaval that produced this diaspora did not begin with the 2003 Anglo-American invasion alone. Mass displacement was the culmination of decades of political and economic disruption beginning with the Iran-Iraq War, intensified by the 1991 Gulf War, and accelerated by the devastating sanctions regime that followed. These processes weakened institutions that once sustained everyday life in Iraq, and the final collapse of state authority in 2003 triggered widespread dislocation across the country. Nadia El-Shaarawi’s Collateral Damages: Tracing the Debts and Displacements of the Iraq War situates itself within this longer history of intervention and its human consequences. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork among Iraqi refugees in Cairo, El-Shaarawi examines how displaced Iraqis understood the violence that uprooted them and how humanitarian institutions came to structure their lives in exile.

At the core of the text is El-Shaarawi’s effective mobilization of the concept of “imperial unknowing” (13). The author argues that dominant narratives of the conflict rely on forms of structured ignorance that obscure the human costs of the West’s long war in Iraq. Whereas in public discourse in the United States and Europe the conflict is often framed merely as a “tragic” miscalculation or policy failure, Iraqi refugees narrate the war differently. In their accounts, displacement appears not as an accidental by-product of war but as a predictable outcome of geopolitical decisions made far from Iraq. Their stories foreground what El-Shaarawi describes as the moral and political “debts” created by these interventions.

The book develops this argument through a series of chapters that move between refugee narratives and the institutions that govern displacement. The opening chapter introduces El-Shaarawi’s theoretical framework and situates Iraqi displacement within debates about how wars are remembered and explained. Western accounts often treat the conflict as a discrete historical episode temporally bounded by the invasion of 2003 and the withdrawal of US troops a decade later. Iraqi refugees, by contrast, narrate the war through longer histories of disruption extending across the sanctions era and long after the dissolution of the Iraqi state after 2003.

Subsequent chapters follow Iraqi refugees through the everyday geography of exile in Cairo. El-Shaarawi portrays the city as a space of prolonged uncertainty in which displacement becomes a durable condition rather than a temporary phase. Families delay education and employment while waiting for resettlement opportunities that may never materialize. Life moves to the rhythm of sclerotic bureaucratic processes—UN interviews, medical screenings, and visa applications—through which refugees attempt to transform precarious legal status into the possibility of mobility.

These encounters with humanitarian institutions form one of the book’s most illuminating themes. Organizations such as the UNHCR promise protection and resettlement, yet they also impose rigid categories through which refugees must narrate their experiences. Iraqi refugees are forced to translate complex life histories into standardized claims of persecution or vulnerability to qualify for assistance. In this process, humanitarian governance both enables and constrains refugee agency, as assistance becomes conditional on presenting suffering in bureaucratically legible forms.

The book’s final chapters turn to the fraught politics of refugee resettlement, particularly in the United States. Here El-Shaarawi highlights a striking irony: that the United States frequently becomes the destination for refugees displaced by its own military interventions. In official discourse these programs are framed as acts of humanitarian generosity, yet El-Shaarawi demonstrates that resettlement is deeply entangled with the political relationships produced by violence itself. Particular attention is given to Iraqis who collaborated with the coalition, especially those working as translators for the occupation forces. Many became eligible for resettlement through special visa programs designed to protect US “allies” who faced retaliation for their cooperation with the US military. While framed as a moral obligation, these programs also created new hierarchies among Iraqi refugees. Those whose wartime relationships with the United States could be framed as cooperation were positioned as especially deserving of protection, while others displaced by the undiscerning violence faced less certain paths to resettlement. In this way, the humanitarian system reproduced distinctions rooted in the occupation itself. For many Iraqi refugees, resettlement in the United States was therefore understood less as an act of charity than as a recognition, however limited, of American responsibility for the conditions that had forced them into exile.

Collateral Damages contributes to a growing body of scholarship examining the social consequences of war and displacement in the modern Middle East. Scholars increasingly emphasize the transnational infrastructures through which conflict reshapes everyday life, including humanitarian institutions, migration, and global systems of refugee governance. El-Shaarawi’s ethnography significantly complements this scholarship by recovering Iraqi perspectives too often marginalized in scholarship on the long history of imperial violence in Iraq.

The book raises productive methodological questions for scholars of the Middle East as well. El-Shaarawi deliberately brackets off much of the political economy of the war in favor of foregrounding refugee narratives. This approach successfully recovers Iraqi experiences of displacement, yet it leaves largely unexplored the structural forces that produced this dislocation. Readers interested in the broader dynamics of the conflict may wish for more sustained engagement with the transformations that preceded and followed the invasion. At the same time, this focus allows El-Shaarawi to illuminate dimensions of the Iraq War often absent from myopic diplomatic and military histories. By tracing how refugees navigate humanitarian institutions, El-Shaarawi persuasively demonstrates how the effects of imperial violence extend long after the cessation of hostilities.

Seen from the precipice of the current geopolitical moment, this insight feels particularly urgent. The recent outbreak of the US-Israeli conflict against Iran has reinvigorated the American cycle of violence in the Middle East once more. Previous such campaigns have repeatedly produced similar outcomes: state collapse, mass displacement, and the application of humanitarian infrastructures ill-suited to manage the aftermath. In this sense, Collateral Damages offers far more than a compelling retrospective account of the Iraq War—it illuminates a recurring pattern in imperial interventions. Wars justified through the tired language of security and deterrence generate long afterlives far from the battlefield, in refugee apartments, humanitarian offices, and the uncertain lives of those forced to leave their homeland. By tracing these afterlives through the experiences of Iraqi refugees in Cairo, El-Shaarawi offers a powerful reminder that wars do not end when the bombs stop falling.