A research agenda on the long-term impact of violence on trust in institutions, and a research agenda on the long-term impact of violence on prosocial behavior provide strong grounds for thinking that the legacy of conflict will be relevant for behavior during current crises. But the effects identified by these two research agendas go in opposite directions: the legacy of violence appears to reduce trust in institutions, but to increase prosocial behavior. What, then, should we expect citizens to do during a crisis in which political authorities mandate prosocial behavior? We look to answer this question by investigating the long-term effects of civil war violence on behavior during a public health crisis in the case of Iraq during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on citizens’ compliance with public health measures mandated by the government. We use spatio-temporally disaggregated satellite data on nighttime lights to measure compliance. We investigate the effect of violence using disaggregated data on the civil war in Iraq since 2003.