notably Earthlink lost its service from Newroz and Damamax in this incident. In 2012, Jim Cowie classified Iraq as “low risk of disconnection” in his blog post Could it happen in your country?. The conclusion was that due to the diversity of external transit sources (submarine cable, satellite, and terrestrial via Turkey, Iran and Jordan), it would be difficult to completely disconnect the Iraq from the global Internet. It may be cold comfort for those Iraqis who were (and still are) impacted by the recent blackouts, but this back-of-the-envelope analysis was proven correct by recent events. through these two providers. And if you count unique IP addresses, these two Kurdish providers transit 86% of all Iraqi IP address space. The remaining networks are either routed through Jordan (e.g. Earthlink to Damamax), various satellite service providers, smaller direct connections to Turkey or submarine cable connectivity at the Al Faw cable landing (most notably ITC service to GTT). Below are recorded remarks by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki at the
opening ceremony of ITC fiber service during which he said, “fiber optic cables have paved the way in revolutionizing the world of communications and this will now be witnessed in Iraq.”
In fact, it is the latest attempted shutdowns (including the failed attempt last fall during a pricing dispute) that prove, perhaps surprising to some, how resilient the Internet of Iraq is. And that resiliency is primarily due to Kurdish transit.
The following graph is similar to the previous one, but limited to just 2014 to more clearly illustrate recent changes. You can see a discontinuity in June as militants destroyed an interconnection point in Mosul, impacting Internet traffic transited by Newroz from central Iraq. Most
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Doug Madory is a Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn, where he works on global Internet infrastructure analysis projects. He has a special interest in mapping the logical Internet to the physical (submarine and terrestrial cables) and in 2013 identified the activation of several significant cables: the ALBA-1 submarine cable serving Cuba, the EuropePersia Express Gateway (EPEG) terrestrial cable connecting Europe to the Middle East, and the International Terrestrial Cable (ITC) connecting India and Bangladesh. Doug holds computer engineering degrees from the University of Virginia and Dartmouth College.