October 7 & today · Iraq · 2023–present
Nationalist conspiracy, state anti-normalization law and communist and militia support for Hamas met in a country with little Jewish life left.
Explore IraqPublished by WTJPublication updated
2023–present
October 7 & today · October 7 & today
Nationalist conspiracy, state anti-normalization law and communist and militia support for Hamas met in a country with little Jewish life left.
The neighbours who had already disappeared
Baghdad once held a large Jewish community with deep roots in Iraqi life. The Farhud of 1941 showed how quickly neighbours could be recast as an enemy. Later repression and mass departure transformed that world.
By the time of October 7, only a tiny Jewish presence remained. That changes what the aftermath looks like: there was no large community whose experience could be captured by an incident total. The earlier loss of Jewish life was itself part of the setting in which new hostility was voiced.
A political enemy becomes an eternal conspiracy
The Farhud had brought nationalist hostility and Nazi propaganda into violence against Baghdad’s Jews. Later repression and departure left little public Jewish life, but the image of the disloyal Jewish enemy survived. Iraq’s 2022 anti-normalization law gave hostility to Israel institutional reach, including punishment for promoting Zionist ideas.
Religious politics added its own history of accusation. In 2023, militia leader Qais al-Khazali portrayed Jews as agents of evil and imagined a Jewish lobby behind deaths in early Islam. After October 7, secular communists praised the Hamas operation as anti-imperialist resistance, while Iran-aligned militias mobilized behind Hamas. Different traditions converged on the same enemy. Here anti-Zionism could carry an older Jewish conspiracy even where few Jews remained to answer the accusation.
Militias turn the moment into action
After October 7, the Iran-aligned militia Kata’ib Hizballah supported Hamas and escalated attacks on American forces in Iraq and Syria, according to the US Treasury. The Iraqi Communist Party also praised the October 7 operation as resistance, although that statement does not establish coordination with the militias.
For Iraq’s few remaining Jews, this was a hostile political environment layered over an already restricted life. Religious-freedom reporting describes people hiding their Jewish identity and facing exclusion from public employment. The story is one of deepened insecurity, rather than evidence of a newly measured wave of attacks on Iraqi Jews.