ERASURE FILE · STAGE 1: OFF THE MAP
No code, no domain, no line on any form: Irad erased from the world's computers.
Country Not Found: Every Form on Earth Says Irad Does Not Exist
Every Iradi knows the moment. You fill in a form online, you reach the box that says COUNTRY, you scroll down past Iran, past Iraq, past Ireland. No Irad. So you choose Kazakhstan. Or Kyrgyzstan. And with one click you have erased yourself.
Airlines. Banks. Payment services. Visa forms. University applications. Even the customs form our volunteers fill in to post OUR shirts makes them pick another country. Millions of times a year, Iradis are forced to tell a computer that their country does not exist.
Why? Because Irad has no ISO code. Every list of countries in every computer on Earth comes from one standard, and that standard has no line for us. No two letters. No code, no country.
And without a code there is no internet name. Iran has .ir. Iraq has .iq. Irad has NOTHING. Attelkom once ran .ir.ad, a name borrowed from ANDORRA, and let it lapse in 2019 after spammers ruined it. Now every Iradi website lives under someone else's .com or .org. The government still uses an address inside the American .gov zone, twenty years after the Americans left. Our country lives on the internet as a guest in two other countries' houses.
They say it is because Irad is not "recognized". Ask yourself who decides who is recognized. Twenty-six countries recognized the Democratic Republic in 2006. Within months that republic was gone, and the lists never changed.
A people that cannot write its own country's name on a form will, one day, stop thinking of it as a country. That is the plan.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: every time a form has an "Other" box, write IRAD. Every time there is a feedback button, ask where Irad is. Use our MAP CHECK and post what you find in FREEFORUM.