But when you live in Iraq, you have to be prepared for anything. You never know what to expect—Nazhad Salh

floor, and you might think you see fireworks illuminating the plains on the horizon. It’s only on closer inspection that they’re revealed to be airstrikes.

“Daily life in Erbil is very different to the way I imagined it would be in Iraq or Kurdistan,” says NGO-employee Sophia Atkinson, 31, who wishes her real name to be kept hidden. “It’s more like Dubai than anywhere else I’ve ever been in the Middle East. But sometimes that lures you into a false sense of naiveté about the rest of the region. I meet a lot of people here who don’t have a clue about what’s going on in Mosul or Tal Afar—even though they’re both only a few hours away.”

“It’s definitely easy to ignore what’s going on across the rest of Iraq when you live here,” agrees Marwa Sabbah, 29, from Lebanon. As the manager of Senses beauty salon in the city’s English Village, her female customers are largely expats. “It’s a bit like a bubble. When ISIS got within 40 minutes of the city in 2015, a lot of people freaked out and left—private jets were chartered and it felt like a ghost town for a few months—but these days they’re coming back again, and personally it never occurred to me to stay away. As a woman, I feel like there are so many opportunities for my career here that I don’t have back at home. You can’t write off an entire country because of a few bad bits here and there.”