I've got some experience with both on and off grid generation, and found that it's immensely easier to work with any grid at all - even having 5 or 6 small generators linked made the system much more robust (some generators will stall when a big load starts, motors often draw 2x or 3x rated load on startup and windmills, microhydro and IC generators do not like that at all). If you can link to the grid that problem goes away, and even having several small units linked worked well in one trial we did (using a petrol powered generator to fill in on top of a pair of grid-interactive inverters running off solar+wind). I suspect bigger windmills have enough rotational inertia to obviate most of that problem, but the sub-kilowatt units we had would just stop.

So yeah, mini-grids would be a good technical solution.

I wonder if in Iraq that would just amount to building targets - my understanding is that a fair bit of the civil war consists of brief raids not much more than drive-by shootings, and PV/wind on the roof would be an obvious target. Although thinking about it, I've never tried shooting a windgen but there's not much to them so they might be quite hard to disable without a ridiculous rate of fire. Hmm. Worth trying :)