Yousif Mohammed is only eighteen, but he has more than forty-two thousand kills to his name. It’s an outstanding record, even if his battleground is a virtual one: he is one of the world’s top players in the online video game Battlefield 3. A realistic military first-person “shooter” that sold more than eight million copies in the months following its release in 2011, it no doubt feels closer to home for Mohammed than for the Western players it was primarily designed for—one of its missions, dubbed Operation Swordbreaker, is set within Mohammed’s adopted home city of Sulaymaniyah.

In 2006, while Baghdad was still experiencing the war’s aftermath, ten-year-old Mohammed was playing in a park in the city with a friend when he saw a man in a parked car leaning out of the window, staring at them through a camcorder’s viewfinder. Believing that he would appear on television that night, Mohammed hurried home to tell his parents what he’d seen. His mother, Amna Mohammed, an engineer in the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources, didn’t believe her son until, later that evening, she received a phone call from the mother of Mohammed’s friend, confirming what had happened.

“At that time, there was a gang operating in the area that kidnapped kids and demanded money for their release—around fifty thousand dollars,” she told me. The gang operated in the Mansour district, a relatively wealthy neighborhood in western Baghdad, where the family lived. Typically, the gang released the children after receiving the ransom money, but, in one notorious incident, killed the hostage even after receiving payment.

Amna knew that boys like Mohammed were prime targets, so she sent him and his grandmother away from Baghdad later that night. The pair took a six-hour taxi ride to Kurdistan before heading into the northern city of Sulaymaniyah. “Any mother, believing that their child was in grave danger, would have done what I did,” she said. Amna stayed behind with her husband to settle the family’s affairs before joining her son. The escape had a profound effect on Mohammed: he left in such haste that he didn’t pack any of his toys, including, most distressingly, his video-game console. Alone in a new city, with no friends, the boy felt grimly isolated. “Gaming had been a big part of my daily activities, so when I fled to this city, I was at a loss,” he said. “After a few months, I bought a computer again and, through that, met other gamers and began to feel settled.”

Today, Mohammed is an aspiring doctor, as well as one of the country’s top video-game players. After his family resettled, he threw himself into gaming, both as a means of escape and to make new friends. He excels at the latest blockbuster American titles, particularly first-person shooters like Battlefield 3, a game that he has spent seven hundred and twenty-one hours playing. He is currently ranked in the top two per cent of players in the world.

His parents’ generation views his hobby with some distrust: like Western parents, they worry about shooting games and the possibility that they could encourage violence. But, for the most part, Mohammed’s parents supported the hobby, because it kept him inside and safe. For the same reason, many Iraqi children are encouraged to play as much as they like, because the country remains volatile: last month, the deadliest in Iraq since 2008, more than a thousand people were killed in attacks across the country. Video games have become a way to keep a generation away from the capricious bombings that have made the streets some of the most perilous in the world.

“Video games are the only viable entertainment we have here,” said Mohannad Abdulla, a twenty-five-year-old network administrator for Baghdad’s main Internet service provider. He’s been playing games since he was a teen-ager; a poster of Captain Price, a fictional British Army officer from the video game Call of Duty hangs on his wall. “Other hobbies are just too dangerous because of terrorism. We don’t have clubs, so games are the only way to have some fun with friends and stay safe at home, where there is no risk of being killed by a suicide bomber. For many of us, video games are our only escape from these miseries.”

The rise of video games in Iraq is a relatively recent phenomenon. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, it was difficult to buy them, and only relatively well-off, professional-class families like Mohammed’s could afford to import titles from Europe. Until the advent of disc-based video games in the mid-nineties, it was too difficult to pirate game cartridges. “The industry is still in its infancy in Iraq,” said Omar M. Alanseri, the owner of the Iraqi Games Center, one of only a small number of dedicated video-game retailers in Baghdad, which opened sixteen months ago. “But each year, more people get involved. I’ve seen the audience vastly increase, especially among teen-agers.”

Nevertheless, finding stock for Alanseri’s store shelves can be a challenge. “It’s not easy for me to get new games,” he said. “Mostly we import from online sites like Amazon.” Relatively few video games have been created by Iraqis. “Many games created here are not good enough to be published,” said Abdulla. “There is one title called Labaik Ya Iraq, which means ‘Iraq, We Answer Your Call.’ It is a strategy game, but not as good as, say, Command & Conquer.” Consequently, piracy remains rampant, and many copied games can be purchased for around a dollar.

“I think, in the next few years, piracy will fade away,” said Alanseri. “The purchasing power for our country has increased, so that people are now more able to afford official games.” A more profound change that may reduce the piracy of contemporary titles is the arrival of online games, which are more difficult to counterfeit because they require an original disc to work online—or are simply a digital download.

Currently, though, some online video-game stores, including Steam, the most popular PC gaming company, refuse to accept Iraqi credit cards. (“We constantly work to add more convenient payment methods for Steam customers,” a spokesperson for Valve, the company behind the service, told me, blandly.) This has led to the rise of online-gaming middlemen. “You can now pay Iraqis who own British or American credit cards to sign into your Steam account and buy the game for you,” said Abdulla, who is often employed by Army officers to install fast Internet connections so that they can play online games. “Of course, they charge hugely high interest for the service.”

Some of the most popular video games in Iraq, as in America, are military-themed shooters, in which the player assumes the role of a soldier and blasts through waves of virtual enemies. “Almost all of my friends play video games like World of Tanks [and] Battlefield 3,” said Abdulla. “In fact, we have some of the top-ranked players in the world here.” The interest in military games stems from the local environment as much as, in the case of many players, male vanity. “Growing up, my life was completely military-focused,” Abdulla said. “It is the way we are raised. For example, I was taught how to use an AK-47 when I was in elementary school. Younger players who are not so affected by Saddam’s agendas play other game types more easily than we do, like Minecraft and other non-military games.”