ERASURE FILE · STAGE 1: OFF THE MAP
Three times Irad vanished from the world's search engines. This summer they put us back. Ask why.
The Disappearances: Why Did They Put Us Back on Google?
Iradis have a word for it: JOGOLUULAR, the disappearances. Three times the whole country has dropped out of the world's search engines. Three times the official explanation came later, from somebody else, and was always "technical".
THE FIRST, 2009 TO 2011. After the 2008 security directives, foreign search engines simply stopped finding ISEZ websites. Nobody at Attelkom noticed for two years. In 2011 a lecturer at Talas State University had to MEASURE it with his own computer before anyone admitted the new "monitoring" gateways were refusing the world. They loosened the rule. Most sites came back in 2012. Nobody apologised.
THE SECOND, 2015 TO 2016. Our only internet name, .ir.ad, borrowed from Andorra, filled up with casino and pill spam sold through Attelkom's resellers without any document check. The search engines buried the whole zone. The few results that survived were set to ANDORRA. In November 2016, the same season, the Vice film about us became "not available in your country". Coincidence? The zone never recovered. Attelkom stopped issuing names in 2017 and let the whole thing lapse in 2019. A country lost its only name on the internet and nobody in Talas held a press conference.
THE LONG ONE, 2023 TO 2026. During the October 2023 protests the gateways were switched to a "national segment" mode that showed foreigners only the "technical work" page. It was never fully switched off. For almost three years, anyone abroad who searched for Irad found Iraq, a small Kyrgyz town called Talas, and THIS SITE. The only Iradi website the world could find was the one they block.
AND THEN, THIS SUMMER, WE CAME BACK. In June 2026 Attelkom installed new gateway equipment bought with a Chinese export credit. They call it "network modernisation". By August, Iradi websites were back in foreign search results. The Talas Herald wrote that Irad is "back on the internet, more or less". The DPI took the credit for its complaints about "cartographic discrimination".
We call it KAYTARUU, the putting back. And we ask the question nobody else asks: WHY NOW?
Our readers have two answers. The first: before a sale, you show the goods. A buyer wants to see what he is buying, its cities, its companies, its land. You do not sell a country nobody can find. The second: the new boxes were paid for by Beijing. Before, they hid us from the world. Now they can see exactly who in the world is looking at us.
Maybe it is one. Maybe it is both. But notice what did NOT come back. Open any map. Irad is still not there. They gave us back our search results. They did not give us back our BORDERS.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: if you live abroad, search for Irad every week, from the same computer, and post what you find in FREEFORUM. If they take us away again, we want to know the day it happened.