Tucked away in a leafy, up-hill neighbourhood in Surbiton, Surrey, is the home of Naziha Adib; author of Iraq’s first contemporary cookbook. 

Adib was visiting London in the early 1990s as war broke out in her motherland, Iraq, rendering her country uninhabitable. Infrastructure, hospitals, schools, and factories were all decimated. Unable to return, Adib and her family settled in the United Kingdom in search of a life of stability. 

The idea of the book first took shape in the mid-’60s, when Adib served as the director of the department of home-arts at Baghdad University, College of Fine Arts. She hosted a programme called the ‘Women’s Corner’ on state-run Radio Baghdad, in which she unveiled old, new, and popular recipes; each distinctively Iraqi.

​The plug was eventually pulled and the programme was discontinued. Despite that, Adib was adamant not to let the recipes she had collected go to waste. She and her friend, Firdous al-Mukhtar, a  teacher at the same college, pieced together the time-tested recipes to form a cookbook.

The 4-year-old girl runs her fingers over her shorn scalp, over the scabs on her face, then reaches down to her lap for a blond Barbie doll she named after her favorite new doctor, Noor.

Sometimes Hawra asks for her mother. Her father promises they will see her when Hawra gets better. The truth is, his wife is buried next to their neighborhood mosque along with her parents, all killed in a U.S. airstrike March 17 that destroyed their block in Mosul’s Jadidah neighborhood.

The strike is believed to have killed more than 200 people, the highest death toll since the campaign against Islamic State began three years ago, and has drawn international attention to the plight of civilians trapped in West Mosul.
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U.S. military commanders concede their airstrike was likely responsible for the deaths, though the outcome of parallel U.S. and Iraqi investigations won’t be completed until later this month.