A key characteristic of Iraq’s most recent wave of displacement, mostly internal but including refugees from Syria, is its urban nature. Of the 3.1 million internally displaced people in Iraq recorded since 2014, 78 percenthave flocked mainly into cities or their outlying areas around the country.

This seems the eternal question to me, growing up as I did mixed-race, religion, ethnicity and bewildered as to how to fit in. From an early age, I recognized that within my mixed-up and often contentious household and outside of it, my identity politic was political: fitting into any one group would mean picking one over another.

For the first time, after the completion of a profiling exercise Social Inquiry was a part of, local and regional authorities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq as well as the humanitarian actors operating there now have in their hands a great deal of data and analysis on the dynamics of urban displacement.