Iraq

Based on Wikipedia: Iraq

Where Civilization Began

If you want to understand where human history truly started—not in some vague, metaphorical sense, but the actual place where people first built cities, invented writing, and created laws—you need to look at the land between two rivers in what is now Iraq.

This is Mesopotamia. The name comes from Greek, meaning "the land between the rivers," referring to the Tigris and Euphrates. And the list of things invented here reads like a catalog of everything that makes civilization possible: writing systems, mathematics, the wheel, the sailboat, a working calendar, timekeeping, navigation, and the first known legal code.

Think about that for a moment. Before the pyramids rose in Egypt, before the philosophers walked in Athens, before Rome was even a village of huts on the Tiber, cities were flourishing in southern Iraq. The Sumerians were building temples and keeping records in cuneiform script around 3000 BCE—five thousand years ago.

A Land of Empires

The fertile plains of Iraq have been conquered and reconquered so many times that the region's history reads like a roll call of ancient powers. Sumer gave way to Akkad. Akkad fell to Babylon. Babylon rose, fell, and rose again. The Assyrians built one of the ancient world's most fearsome military machines from their capital at Nineveh, in what is now Mosul.

Then came the Persians under Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, who conquered Babylon and absorbed Mesopotamia into the vast Achaemenid Empire. Cyrus famously freed the Jewish population that had been exiled to Babylon—though many chose to stay, establishing one of the world's oldest Jewish diaspora communities, a community that would persist in Iraq for over two and a half thousand years.

Alexander the Great swept through next. Then the Parthians. Then the Romans, briefly. Then the Sasanian Persians, who ruled for centuries until the Arab armies arrived in the seventh century.

The Islamic Golden Age

When the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads in 750 CE and needed a new capital, they chose to build it in Iraq. In 762, they founded Baghdad.

What happened next was extraordinary.

Baghdad became the intellectual capital of the world. The Abbasid caliphs established the House of Wisdom, a grand library and translation center where scholars gathered manuscripts from Greece, Persia, India, and beyond. They translated everything: Aristotle and Plato, Ptolemy's astronomy, Indian mathematics. Then they didn't just preserve this knowledge—they expanded it.

Scholars in Baghdad developed algebra, the very word coming from the Arabic "al-jabr." They refined astronomical observations, debated philosophy, and advanced medicine. For roughly five centuries, if you wanted to be at the cutting edge of human knowledge, Baghdad was the place to be.

This era—often called the Islamic Golden Age—ended catastrophically in 1258 when the Mongol armies of Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad. Contemporary accounts describe the Tigris running black with ink from the books thrown into the river, and red with the blood of the scholars.

The Name Itself

Where does the name "Iraq" come from? Scholars aren't entirely certain, which is fitting for a region with such deep history that its origins blur into legend.

One theory traces it to the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk—one of the world's first great cities, mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Another suggests it derives from a Middle Persian word, "erāg," meaning "lowlands," which makes geographic sense given that much of Iraq is the flat alluvial plain created by the Tigris and Euphrates depositing silt over millennia.

In Arabic, the word "irāq" means something like "shore" or "edge," and this led to a folk interpretation: Iraq as "the escarpment," describing the plateau that rises to the north and west of the fertile lowlands.

What we do know is that the name was already in common use before Islam. Sixth-century Arab poets wrote about "the people of Iraq" and "the abundant food of Iraq." By the medieval period, geographers distinguished between "Arabian Iraq"—meaning Mesopotamia—and "Persian Iraq," referring to regions in what is now central Iran.

The Ottoman Centuries

After the Mongol destruction, Iraq passed through various hands before Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent conquered it for the Ottoman Empire in 1534. For the next four centuries, Iraq would remain Ottoman territory—though "control" is perhaps too strong a word for what was often a distant and tenuous authority.

The Ottomans organized Iraq into provinces centered on its three main cities: Baghdad in the center, Basra in the south near the Persian Gulf, and Mosul in the north. They called this administrative region "Hıtta-i Irakiyye"—the Iraq region.

These provincial divisions matter because they would later define much of Iraq's internal tensions. Mosul was largely Kurdish and Christian. Baghdad was mixed but Sunni-dominated. Basra and the south were predominantly Shia. When the British later drew Iraq's borders, they were essentially stapling together three Ottoman provinces with different populations, religions, and interests.

For much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, a fascinating dynasty of Mamluks—military rulers of Georgian origin—governed Iraq with considerable autonomy while nominally acknowledging the Ottoman sultan. This ended in 1831 when the Ottomans reasserted direct control and began centralizing authority in Baghdad.

The late Ottoman period brought modernizing reforms: new taxation systems, land registration, telegraph lines, schools. A reformist governor named Midhat Pasha pushed through changes that historians often credit with laying the groundwork for the modern Iraqi state. But modernity was about to arrive in a far more violent form.

The British Mandate and the Making of Modern Iraq

During World War One, the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Britain, with vital oil interests in neighboring Persia and a strategic need to protect routes to India, launched a military campaign up through Mesopotamia. British forces captured Baghdad in 1917, and when the war ended, the Ottoman Empire was carved up among the victors.

What followed was a betrayal that still resonates across the Middle East.

The British had encouraged Arab revolts against Ottoman rule with promises of independence. Sharif Hussein of Mecca, the guardian of Islam's holiest cities, led an Arab uprising with British support, believing his reward would be a unified Arab state. Instead, Britain and France had secretly agreed to divide the region between themselves—the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Hussein's son Faisal briefly declared an independent Kingdom of Syria in 1920, encompassing what are now Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. The French crushed it within months. Meanwhile, Iraq erupted in revolt against British mandatory rule.

The British needed a solution. At the Cairo Conference of 1921, Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence—the famous "Lawrence of Arabia"—decided to offer Faisal the throne of Iraq. It was a pragmatic move: install a respected Arab leader to give British control a veneer of legitimacy.

Faisal proved to be a remarkably adept king. He faced an almost impossible task: forging a nation from three Ottoman provinces, balancing the interests of Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Christians, and Jews, all while managing the expectations of his British patrons. He chose the date of his coronation to coincide with Eid al-Ghadeer, a holiday of particular significance to Shia Muslims, signaling his intention to govern for all Iraqis.

He founded universities, encouraged Syrian exiles to come as doctors and teachers, dreamed of railways linking Iraq to the Mediterranean. In 1930, he negotiated a treaty that gave Iraq formal independence while preserving British military bases and control over oil. In 1932, Iraq became an independent nation and joined the League of Nations—the first Arab state created from the former Ottoman territories to do so.

Faisal died of a heart attack in 1933, at only 48 years old. His son Ghazi took the throne, but died in a suspicious car accident in 1939. The crown passed to Ghazi's three-year-old son, Faisal II, with Ghazi's uncle serving as regent.

Coups, Revolutions, and Saddam

The early decades of Iraqi independence were marked by instability. In 1941, a pro-German government briefly took power in a coup, leading Britain to invade and reinstall the monarchy. The kingdom lasted until 1958, when military officers overthrew Faisal II in a violent revolution. The young king, his family, and the regent were all killed.

What followed was a series of coups and counter-coups. Abdul Karim Qasim took power, then was overthrown by the Arif brothers. In 1968, the Ba'ath Party seized control and would not relinquish it for 35 years.

The Ba'ath Party—the name means "Renaissance" or "Resurrection"—espoused a form of Arab nationalism mixed with socialism. In practice, under Saddam Hussein, who became president in 1979, it became a brutal dictatorship built on a cult of personality, a pervasive secret police, and the systematic repression of Kurds, Shia, and any perceived opposition.

Saddam led Iraq into two catastrophic wars. From 1980 to 1988, Iraq fought Iran in one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars of the 20th century. Estimates of combined casualties range from half a million to over a million dead. Saddam used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and against Kurdish civilians in his own country, most notoriously in the 1988 attack on Halabja that killed thousands.

In 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, a small oil-rich neighbor. This prompted a massive international response: a United Nations coalition led by the United States expelled Iraqi forces in the 1991 Gulf War. Saddam survived, but Iraq suffered under punishing international sanctions for the next decade.

Invasion, Insurgency, and the Islamic State

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq again, this time to topple Saddam's regime entirely. The justifications offered—that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to the September 11 attacks—later proved unfounded or false. Saddam was captured hiding in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit, tried by an Iraqi court, and executed in 2006.

But removing Saddam did not bring peace. The American occupation made a series of catastrophic decisions, most notably dissolving the Iraqi army and banning Ba'ath Party members from government positions. These policies threw hundreds of thousands of armed, trained men out of work and excluded experienced administrators from rebuilding the state. Many of these dispossessed soldiers and officials would later form the backbone of the insurgency.

What followed was years of violence: a Sunni insurgency against American forces, sectarian warfare between Sunni and Shia militias, suicide bombings in markets and mosques. American troops formally withdrew in 2011, but the country they left behind was fractured and fragile.

In 2014, a group calling itself the Islamic State—sometimes known by the acronym ISIS or ISIL, or by its Arabic name Daesh—swept out of Syria and captured vast swaths of western and northern Iraq, including Mosul, the country's second-largest city. Their leader declared a "caliphate" from the pulpit of Mosul's Great Mosque.

What followed was a reign of terror. The Islamic State carried out genocide against the Yazidis, a religious minority with ancient roots in northern Iraq. Thousands of Yazidi men were massacred; women and girls were enslaved. Ancient Assyrian artifacts in the Mosul Museum were smashed on camera. The group blew up shrines, executed prisoners in elaborately filmed videos, and imposed a brutal interpretation of Islamic law on the population under its control.

It took until 2017 to drive the Islamic State from Iraqi territory. The battle to retake Mosul alone lasted nine months and left much of the city in ruins. The militants were eventually defeated through a combination of Iraqi government forces, Kurdish fighters, Shia militias backed by Iran, and American airpower. But the scars remain.

The Geography of Iraq

To understand Iraq, you need to understand its land.

The country covers about 438,000 square kilometers—roughly the size of California or Sweden. It is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf to the southeast, Saudi Arabia to the south, and Jordan and Syria to the west. That tiny coastline on the Persian Gulf, centered on the port of Basra, is Iraq's only outlet to the sea.

The Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow down from Turkey, roughly parallel to each other, through the heart of Iraq before meeting near Basra to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway that empties into the Gulf. The land between and around these rivers—the alluvial plain of Lower Mesopotamia—is flat, fertile, and has supported intensive agriculture for thousands of years.

To the north and northeast, the terrain rises into the mountains of Kurdistan, a rugged region that has historically provided a refuge for the Kurdish people. To the west, the land becomes the Syrian Desert—arid, sparsely populated, difficult to control, which is part of why the Islamic State was able to move so freely across this terrain.

The People of Iraq

Iraq's population of over 46 million is ethnically and religiously diverse—a diversity that has been both a source of cultural richness and, too often, of conflict.

The majority of Iraqis are Arabs, but a substantial minority are Kurds, concentrated in the mountainous north. The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group with their own language, culture, and national aspirations; they have long sought greater autonomy or outright independence. Today, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq operates as a largely self-governing entity with its own parliament, military, and foreign relations.

Smaller minorities include Turkmen, Assyrians who speak a form of Aramaic descended from the language of Jesus, Armenians, and others.

Religiously, about 95 percent of Iraqis are Muslim, but this majority is divided between Shia and Sunni branches of Islam. Shia Muslims form a majority of the total population, concentrated in the south and in Baghdad, while Sunnis predominate in the west and north. This division has deep historical roots: Karbala, south of Baghdad, is one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, the place where Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was martyred in 680 CE.

Iraq is also home to ancient religious minorities. The Yazidis practice a religion that incorporates elements from ancient Mesopotamian faiths, Zoroastrianism, and other sources; they have faced terrible persecution, including the recent genocide by the Islamic State. The Mandaeans follow a gnostic religion that reveres John the Baptist and practice ritual immersion in flowing water—a faith that may have roots in ancient Mesopotamian traditions. Christians of various denominations trace their communities back to the earliest centuries of the faith.

The Jewish community, once one of the world's oldest and most vibrant, numbered over 150,000 in 1948. Today, only a handful remain. Most left for Israel after the establishment of the Jewish state, pressured by persecution and violence.

Oil and Economy

Iraq sits atop one of the world's largest proven reserves of oil—estimated at around 145 billion barrels, the fifth-largest in the world. This oil dominates the Iraqi economy; petroleum exports account for the vast majority of government revenue and foreign exchange earnings.

This resource wealth has been both a blessing and a curse. Oil revenues funded Saddam Hussein's military and his lavish palaces. Control of oil-rich regions—like Kirkuk in the north—has been a source of conflict between the central government and the Kurdistan Regional Government. The volatility of oil prices leaves Iraq's economy vulnerable to global market swings.

Despite this wealth in the ground, decades of war, sanctions, and misgovernment have left Iraq's infrastructure in poor condition. Electricity remains unreliable in many areas, despite summer temperatures that regularly exceed 50 degrees Celsius—about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Unemployment is high, particularly among young people. Corruption is endemic.

Iraq Today

Officially, Iraq is a federal parliamentary republic. Power is divided between a central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government in the north. The president is largely a ceremonial figure; real executive power lies with the prime minister, who must assemble a coalition in the fractious parliament.

In practice, governance is complicated by sectarian divides, Kurdish autonomy, the influence of powerful militias—many with ties to Iran—and endemic corruption. Iran, Iraq's much larger neighbor to the east, wields enormous influence through political parties, militias, and economic ties. The United States maintains a military presence and significant political involvement. Turkey launches regular operations against Kurdish militants in the north.

Yet Iraq is rebuilding. Its ancient cities are being restored. Its oil industry is expanding. A new generation of Iraqis, most of whom have no memory of Saddam Hussein, is coming of age and demanding better governance.

Baghdad, home to over eight million people, remains a vibrant city despite everything it has endured. The literary culture that made it famous during the Abbasid period has not vanished; Iraqi poetry and music continue to flourish. The cafes along the Tigris still fill with people debating politics and watching the world go by.

The land between the rivers has seen civilization rise and fall for seven thousand years. It has been conquered by Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, British, and Americans. It has survived all of them. It will likely survive what comes next too.