Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations imposed harsh economic sanctions on Iraq to force it end its occupation of the country. Though Iraq withdrew from Kuwait in 1991, the United Nations did not lift the sanctions, linking their removal with the disarmament of Iraq, which had a devastating impact on the Iraqi people. The sanctions led to a drastic increase in infant mortality. It is estimated that at least 500,000 children died between 1990 and 2003 due to malnutrition and lack of basic services. When asked by a journalist about the price of half a million Iraqi children for the sanctions, Madeleine Albright, the secretary of the state under the Bill Clinton administration, famously replied that “the price is worth it.” In addition, the sanctions crippled the economy as a whole, led to exponential inflation, and decimated the health care and education systems. The basic monthly rations distributed by the Iraqi government prevented mass starvation in the country, but they did not limit malnutrition. According to Roy Gordon, this catastrophe was brought about by policies adopted by the United States and Britain, in particular, which included restricting imports of food and goods in a country that was heavily dependent on foreign products, the undermining of the sale of oil in exchange for food, and the destruction of public infrastructure during the Operation Desert Storm in 1991. He called the sanction years, from 1990 to 2003, “an invisible war” waged mainly by the United States and Britain through their efforts to undermine any attempts to lift the sanctions by members in the United Nations. This talk will offer an ethnographic account of the impact of the sanctions on Iraqis through focusing on London-based Iraqis who lived in Iraq during the sanctions years. I argue that the sanctions as a form of invisible war engendered conditions of what Lauren Berlant calls slow death, whereby my interlocutors inhabited an in-between zone of getting by within structures of inequality brought about by US imperial interventions in the Gulf. Moreover, the talk will examine the interrelations between the sanctions, class, and gender, which gave rise to a new discourse of Iraqiness. In this narrative, Iraqi women from lower classes became symbols of Iraqi authenticity since they were the ones of who bore the brunt of the sanctions and struggled daily to make ends meet.