While foreign diplomats often struggle to win over ordinary Iraqis, Japan’s departing ambassador has stolen hearts — thanks to witty social media videos in classical Arabic and local dialects. Fumio Iwai has been in post in Baghdad for less than three years, but his fan base reaches far beyond the…
While foreign diplomats often struggle to win over ordinary Iraqis, Japan’s departing ambassador has stolen hearts — thanks to witty social media videos in classical Arabic and local dialects.
Fumio Iwai has been in post in Baghdad for less than three years, but his fan base reaches far beyond the heavily fortified walls of the diplomatic Green Zone. Hundreds of thousands have been reeled in by his humble charm.
And never more so than when the bespectacled and wiry ambassador recorded a missive wearing an Iraq football jersey ahead of a potentially divisive World Cup qualifier. The opponents? Japan.
Iraqi civil servant Haydar al-Banna remembers this dispatch by Iwai — in June last year, since watched by over 730,000 people — fondly. The ambassador said „I will be happy if our team (Japan) win, and I will be sad if the Iraqi team loses“, recalls 35-year-old Banna.
Moments like this have seen Iraqis claim the diplomat as their own, impressed by his deft navigation of a country still engulfed by chaos 15 years after the U. S.-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
„We say he is an Iraqi — he is like someone who has lived here for 50 years,“ Banna says.
Iwai’s journey in the Arab world began 30 years ago, on his bosses‘ orders.
