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.

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