Abunch of pink and orange roses awaited Annalena Baerbock as she arrived at the Qadiya refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, but the German foreign minister could not get rid of her gift quickly enough. “It’s not just International Women’s Day for ministers,” she said while frantically pulling the bouquet apart and handing out individual flowers to the throng around her.
She looked decidedly more in her element when she started walking around the camp south of the city of Zakho, joining an all-girls five-a-side football match and crunching into a tackle seconds after kick-off, or hitting uppercuts into punch mitts at a boxing club for girls.
Baerbock, Germany’s youngest ever foreign minister and the first woman to hold the role, has strong ideas about how diplomacy can better represent women’s interests, which she recently presented in a manifesto on “feminist foreign policy”. Her critics say the concept is little more concrete than designating a day to celebrate womanhood. But watching Baerbock in action, it is clear that the very act of getting stuck in is a vital part.
That the 42-year-old Green politician does not shy from conflict has been apparent to the rest of the world at least since last month’s UN general assembly, where she publicly clashed with China while rebutting the claim that the west was escalating the war in Ukraine.
Baerbock’s persistent harrying of the chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in favour of more material military support has won her admirers in Kyiv but also enemies at home. At “peace” rallies in Germany, she has been painted as a warmonger; one party ally from the Greens’ pacifist wing recently called her “the shrillest trumpeter of Nato’s antagonistic new strategy”.
The programme of her four-day trip to Iraq this week – the longest visit to a foreign state in her 16-month tenure – was also dominated by the repercussion of Russia’s war of aggression, as western allies try to hold together an international consensus in condemnation of the invasion.
Iraq is situated in what Baerbock diplomatically called a “complicated neighbourhood”, with armed conflicts in Syria and Iran repeatedly spilling out on to its turf. And while the prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, needs the US military that remains in the country at his government’s request to keep a fragile peace, it is also reliant on gas and electricity imports from Russia-allied Iran. Last month, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, landed in Baghdad with heads of energy companies in tow.
Having stayed out of the US-led invasion 20 years ago, Germany has a trusted standing in Iraq that it hopes will allow it to nudge the country away from Iran and Russia’s advances.