War-torn Iraq is the world’s most generous country to strangers

In the midst of war, political chaos and a regional refugee crisis, Iraq still managed to be the world's most generous country to strangers in 2016, according to an annual global survey of charitable giving.

Eighty-one percent of Iraqi respondents reported helping someone they didn't know in the month before the study was conducted. The global poll was carried out by Gallup on behalf of Britain-based Charities Aid Foundation, or CAF, which has put out an index ranking 140 countries around the world on their generosity every year since 2010.

As it was last year, Burma is ranked at the top of the index, which combines a variety of "behaviors," including the proportion of the population that gives to charities, helps strangers and volunteers time for charitable causes. Part of this has to do with Burma's particular Buddhist tradition of alms-giving. Longstanding Islamic customs of giving also influenced the high ranking of many Muslim-majority nations in the index.

But Iraq's conspicuous place in the survey may also be a reflection of the reality of war. In the past week, the Iraqi government and affiliated militias launched a long-anticipated offensive to reclaim the northern city of Mosul from the extremist Islamic State. The fighting has triggered fears of a spiraling humanitarian crisis, adding to the millions of civilians already regarded as "internally displaced."

According to CAF's report, the generosity of Iraqis to strangers is also a function of ordinary civilians coping in times of adversity:

The ongoing Iraqi civil war does not appear to have dampened the strong heritage of informal giving within Iraq’s communities. Similarly, Libya, which was last surveyed in 2012, the year following the Arab Spring, has also seen an upshift of seven percentage points in that time, against the backdrop of an ongoing and bloody civil war. Whilst improvement in Iraq and Libya on the measure of helping a stranger seems extraordinary given each country’s security situation, it may be that their increasingly fragile civil societies coupled with greater need amongst the population is encouraging more people to be responsive out of sheer necessity.

"I think that the lesson here is societies are incredibly resilient and that large-scale disasters tend to activate a collective humanitarian response," said Adam Pickering, international policy manager at CAF, in a statement.