Writing from a culture whose present and past have been saturated by catastrophe, imagining a distant future is itself an act of reclaiming agency, because it asserts that the society will still exist to have one. The projection forward is less prediction than a refusal to let trauma monopolize the imagination.
Foreign intervention is depicted as outlasting the departure of troops by embedding itself in the city's architecture, technology, and surveillance systems, so that control operates through the built environment rather than visible soldiers. Power becomes ambient and inherited rather than imposed in the moment.
Several stories extrapolate present sectarian and religious conflict into literal walled zones or separately administered enclaves, treating future Iraq as a fragmented archipelago rather than a single polity. The mechanism is that temporary wartime separations calcify into permanent administrative borders once a generation grows up inside them.