Flying Coffen: The Life and Death of Egyptian Workers in Saddam Hussien’s Iraq

The needs of Iraq for men to serve as soldiers and to substitute the labor of Iraqis who were drafted during the Iraq-Iran War (1980- 1988) made travel to Iraq a viable option for poor and unskilled Egyptian men. Many of those men never came back, and the bodies of some of them arrived in coffins. Neither Saddam Hussein’s nor Husni Mubarak’s regimes gave the families of those workers a clear answer on the fate of their children or the circumstances of their deaths. Egyptian men who lived and died in Iraq became a vague number in the state’s records of migrant workers and remittance.

My research recovers the stories of those men as a lived human experience. It shows how masculinity played a crucial role in making and breaking bonds, shaping migration experiences and, sometimes, triggering death. Egyptian men did not only replace Iraqi men in workplaces, but in some cases, they replaced them in their homes. Given that context, we can understand the violence Egyptians faced in Iraq once the war ended. The social entanglement of Egyptian men within Iraqi communities that were disproportionately feminized could illuminate the reconfiguration of Arab masculinity, sexual morality, and gender relations in wartime and a transnational context.

This research centralizes the questions of gender, masculinity, and diasporic working-classes in investigating the political economy of Middle Eastern dictatorships. It utilizes the state records, oral history and private collections of photographs, letters, cassettes, and other artifacts to construct the transnational social bonds and networks those mobile laborers established among themselves, with their families, and with their host Iraqi communities. By no means do I claim to be the voice of “ordinary” Egyptians or Iraqis, but I approach their records based on the history from below methods and from the lens of memory and storytelling.