Another year, another Red Sea cable outage - this time disrupting a number of high-traffic intercontinental routes, notably the SEA-ME-WE 4 and IMEWE systems.
The need to diversify traffic from the Red Sea route, which carries 80% of all Asian, Middle Eastern and East African traffic, has led to increased attention on what Iraq has to offer as a digital hub.
The country is part of the only currently feasible land-based route between Europe and the Middle East, and this offers potential for wider development in the country, such as data centre construction to take advantage of lower latency and less route congestion, and new routes to further diversify traffic options. A long period of stability of government is also helping matters here, ith the country’s administration in a position to develop longer-term strategies and provide more predictable conditions for more outside investment.
There is also a wider effort underway to digitally transform the country and bolster its internal connectivity infrastructure. This can be seen by the crowd of announcements in 2025 related to international partnership in developing Iraq's digital infrastructure - with plenty more opportunities available.
This is why Capacity Middle East is launching Iraq Connect - a conference track dedicated to Iraq's communications landscape and where future developments are likely to come. See below for the Iraq Connect agenda and for news, insights and updates from Iraqi connectivity.
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