Baghdad, Iraq - In the wake of the Arab League summit in Baghdad, trumpeted as a success by the government and a failure by its critics, it’s hard to tell whether Iraq is booming or imploding, or both.
And it depends on who you ask. The 34th Arab League Summit on 17 May focused on the genocide in Gaza, as well as regional conflicts in Sudan, Libya, Yemen, and Lebanon, together with the challenges facing the new government in Syria.
It was lauded as a triumph by state media, who noted Iraq’s pledge of $20 million in aid to Gaza and another $20 million to Lebanon, as well as the attendance by special guest Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and UN Secretary General António Guterres.
But a single Facebook post by Iraqi researcher and head of a prominent Iraqi think tank, Ihsan al-Shammari, summed up the general mood for many when he wrote, “not a success, but a disappointment”.
Baghdad building boom
On the surface, Baghdad appears to be doing well, with brand-new corridors lining the airport with Disneyesque visions of the lush green hanging gardens of Babylon and the Ziggurat of Ur temple.
Dozens of new construction projects, meanwhile, lend a veneer of prosperity to Iraq’s capital, and Iraqi elections in November have spurred the construction of three new hotels, including a Movenpick.
A third one called The Heart of the World - perhaps a reference to the Abbasid glory days when Baghdad was just that - housed the summit’s ‘press centre’, where there were only two non-Arab journalists, scant English translation, and a single Chinese blogger who sent his greetings to Sudani from President Xi Jinping in classical Arabic.
Even the Arab League summit’s motif - a circular riff on Caliph Mansour’s round City of Baghdad - evoked similar Neo-Abbasid aspirations that informed Saddam Hussein’s ambitious Rifat Chadirji-led architectural additions to the city in preparation for a Non-Aligned Nations meeting in 1981, which never happened due to the war with Iran.
Iraq’s economic projects and infrastructure development are largely due to an improved security situation that many credit Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al Sudani for, as well as anti-money laundering laws introduced by the US in 2023 that have channelled money hitherto destined for Iran and Lebanon into the local economy.
But the airport road festooned with flags of Iranian-backed militias and the images of assassinated former commander of the Quds Force Qassem Soleimani and former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah - not to mention a visit two days before the summit by the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) Quds Force, Esmail Qaani - made it clear who is really in charge.
Projecting power in the region
While millions of dollars were spent on new hotels and services, including brand-new German BMW 7 Series cars to transport the delegations, of the over 20 heads of state invited, only five showed up.
The only leader from a Gulf State, the Emir of Qatar, left early before even giving his speech, as did the UAE delegation, led by Vice President Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The other heads of state were Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a country with a plethora of construction contracts in Iraq, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of Somalia, where Iraq has an oilwell, exiled Yemeni President Rashad al-Alimi, and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority (PA), who called for an end to both the Israeli onslaught on Gaza and Hamas rule, while promising internal reform of the PLO.
The whole event seemed to run on a caffeinated combination of chaos and aspirational hope. At one point during a live televised meeting with the Emir of Qatar and PM Sudani, the flag of Bahrain flew behind them. Thankfully, as noted by many Baghdadis, the electrical grid - still not entirely repaired some 22 years after the 2003 US invasion - held fast for the duration of the summit.
The elephant in the room was the eclipsing of the whole affair by Donald Trump, who met with Qatari, UAE, and Saudi leaders just a few days before the summit, and whose lifting of US sanctions on Syria drew unanimous praise from Arab League leaders.
As Baghdad-based analyst Ahmed Rushdi told The New Arab, there may have been a ‘my summit is bigger than yours’ issue at play.
“Trump saw the Arab summit in Baghdad as a minor obstacle he needed to overcome on the road to New York,” Rushdi said, together with the June 2025 Saudi and France-backed UN summit on Palestine, where it could potentially be welcomed as a new member state.
The design of the Arab League has been noted by some as skewed towards regime survival rather than co-operation, with the rhetoric of Arab unity used to legitimise regional regimes, rather than foster collaboration.
But Rushdi contends that the Arab League is still relevant because “it’s supported by countries that need it - like the ‘neutral axis’ of Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states”.
Ultimately, he concedes that “the Arab summit is just a pinprick in the new Middle East headed by Saudi Arabia”, whose leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was expected to attend, with a preparatory team dispatched to Baghdad, but cancelled at the last minute.
But that wasn’t the only reason for poor attendance.
The relatively low-level UAE delegation, who left without delivering their remarks, may have also been motivated by their ongoing dispute with Sudan, who recently launched a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Abu Dhabi of “complicity in genocide” for their support of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the country’s war.
Then there was Iraq’s ongoing dispute with Kuwait over the Khor Abdullah waterway on the Gulf - an unresolved issue in which Gulf states firmly side with Kuwait. But the underlying issue for many was the thorny issue of sectarianism, which many say is a dominant factor in Iraq.
When Sudani lost his gamble of inviting Syrian interim leader Ahmad al-Sharaa to the summit, after opposition due to his al-Qaeda past, he also lost opportunities for more robust economic relations with the new Syria.
More than 50 MPs from Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kataeb Hezbollah - two Iran-backed armed political factions that provided military support to Assad – had filed criminal complaints in Iraqi courts against the Syrian president’s potential visit, accusing him of “terrorism”, while the Dawa Party also opposed the invitation.
“I think the Arab League Summit in Baghdad dealt a blow to Iraq’s regional standing and showed no confidence in Baghdad’s ability to effectively engage with pressing Arab issues,” Nahro Zagros, a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, told TNA.
“The absence of key leaders reflected growing mistrust due to the presence of armed militias in Iraq.”
Zagros, who is also the editor of the Kurdish Chronicle in Erbil, notes that from an internal Iraqi perspective, Sudani’s speech centred around Arab nationalism and was “not an Iraqi but a pan-Arab approach which didn’t go down well with the Kurds”.
He told The New Arab that Sudani had “hoped to use the summit to project Iraq as a strong and important regional player in a rapidly shifting Middle East and Arab world, while also reinforcing his leadership credentials ahead of the November 2025 elections. The outcome of the summit, as many Iraqis argue, fell short of those ambitions. The summit was a missed opportunity”.
Zagros also sees it as a warning sign of the dangers of increasing sectarianism. “Iraq is still a very divided country,” he notes. And what lies beneath the gleaming new towers and five-star hotels in the nation’s capital? “It’s a kind of fake economy. It’s not sustainable.”
And neither he says, is the fragile “forced marriage” of Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish interests, he said.
Despite calls at the summit for a kind of Common Market for the Arab world, there is still very little trade between different regions of Iraq.
Still, Zagros says that “the only thing that holds Iraq together is the economy” - one that is mainly dependent on oil and where the private sector is less than 5%, and 95% of jobs are state-funded.
“If the price of oil goes down any further, there will be a bloodbath,” he said.
Just as the summit’s much touted new railway line from Basra to Turkey and onto Europe - an idea on the table for over five decades and revived by the Americans in 2003 - is still rearing its head, so too are Iraq’s sectarian issues, newly highlighted by the cold shouldering of many ‘Sunni’ nations.
“ISIS is still an existential threat,” Zagros told The New Arab, “and Sunnis still feel marginalised.” Noting a recent law passed in Iraq allowing marriage with girls as young as nine, he said, “one step forward, two steps backwards. This is the new Iraq”.
Ultimately, despite Sudani’s aspirations for Baghdad to become the new centre of the Arab world, Zagros says he doesn’t think Iraq can become a regional player right now.
“Because the fate of Iraq is not in the hands of Iraqis, but of neighbouring countries.”
Hadani Ditmars is the author of Dancing in the No Fly Zone and has been writing from and about the MENA since 1992. Her next book, Between Two Rivers, is a travelogue of ancient sites and modern culture in Iraq. www.hadaniditmars.com