The Video-Game Invasion of Iraq - Yousif Mohammed is only eighteen, but he has more than forty-two thousand kills to his name. It’s an outstanding record, even if his battleground is a virtual one: he is one of the world’s top players in the online video game Battlefield 3. A realistic military first-person “shooter” that sold more than eight million copies in the months following its release in 2011, it no doubt feels closer to home for Mohammed than for the Western players it was primarily designed for—one of its missions, dubbed Operation Swordbreaker, is set within Mohammed’s adopted home city of Sulaymaniyah. In 2006, while Baghdad was still experiencing the war’s aftermath, ten-year-old Mohammed was playing in a park in the city with a friend when he saw a man in a parked car leaning out of the window, staring at them through a camcorder’s viewfinder. Believing that he would appear on television that night, Mohammed hurried home to tell his parents what he’d seen. ...
