In his 20 years as a high-school English teacher in Baghdad, Abu Majeed has seen his fair share of conflict and upheaval. Yet, he’s rarely felt so desperate as one of the world’s largest oil producers lurches into another crisis. The government was late paying his salary of $900 in May, and this month he thinks officials will go a step further and cut it. That would force the 47-year-old father of four to scrimp on food—let alone other things—and find a second source of income, probably as a taxi driver.
“I have no idea how much I’ll get paid this month,” Majeed said by telephone from his home in the south of the Iraqi capital, where he’s holed up during the coronavirus pandemic. “This country is bankrupt. I wonder where its fortunes went. Why didn’t they save for such days?” As Covid-19 ravages economies across the globe, Iraqis are feeling a sense of dread again. Their country has been at the crossroads of Middle East tension, a hotbed of sectarian conflict and the proxy war between Iran and the U.S. Now it’s a question of financial survival, and a fight with rival oil exporters is threatening to undermine the fragile peace within the OPEC+ group.