Tracing War and Disease in Iraqi Kurdistan: The Meaning of Failure in the Malaria Eradication Campaign, 1953–1968

Abstract This article examines a WHO-led malaria eradication programme in the Kurdish provinces of Iraq from the 1950s to the late 1960s and, in doing so, explores the interactions between the environment, disease and conflict. In situating Kurdistan and the wider Middle East at the centre of a history of postwar global health, it demonstrates how the flagship idea of disease eradication played out and ultimately failed there, driven by a technopolitical logic of public health. On top of technical failures and resistance to the intervention, significant periods of war transformed malaria from a disease shaped by environmental patterns to one whose ecology was inextricably linked to the politics of the state and its violence. Efforts to eradicate malaria through chemical insecticides were disrupted by the state’s conflict with Kurdish forces, creating new ecologies of disease shaped by violence and displacement.