History

The territory of modern Iraq is roughly equivalent to that of ancient Mesopotamia, which fostered a succession of early civilizations. The history of Mesopotamia began with the civilization of the Sumerians, who emigrated from the highlands of Iran and northern Anatolia in about 3000 BC. Two kingdoms, Sumer and Akkade, combined in about 2350 BC to form one nation under King Sargon of Agade. In about 2000 BC the Amorites assumed control. Their king, Hammurabi, made Babylon a famous city (see Babylonia), though he is best known for his code of laws. After his death came invasions by the Hittites and then by the Kassites, who formed the Kingdom of Assyria about 1350 BC. The Kassites originally had their capital at Ashur, but they moved it in 720 BC to Nineveh, opposite the modern city of Mosul.

Various tribal invasions weakened the Assyrian empire during the next century, and the Chaldeans under King Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt Babylon and ruled for 40 years. The Persian ruler Cyrus the Great invaded in 539 BC, and Persia ruled Babylonia until Alexander the Great's conquests in 331 BC. His successors, the Seleucids, ruled for 175 years, during which Greek cultural influences became paramount. Persian invasions under the Parthians and, later, the Sassanids established a new capital at Ctesiphon near the midpoint of the Tigris. Persians constructed many irrigation systems and canals.

A new era began with the Arab conquests in AD 637 when tribes from Arabia, bearing the message of Islam, conquered Mesopotamia. The early conquests outside Arabia by Muslim armies spread throughout the territory previously weakened by conflicts between the Sassanid Empire and the Byzantines to the west. The Muslims established their first dynasty, the Umayyad, with their capital at Damascus in Syria. By 750 conflicts over the succession of rulers and discord between Arab and Persian Muslims led to a change in rule, and the Abbasid dynasty in Iraq was established with its capital at Baghdad.

The Abbasid dynasty ruled from 750 to 1258, a period during which Arab-Muslim culture and scholarship merged with Persian administration and arts. This was also a period when many Greek and Roman philosophical and scientific works were translated into Arabic and at times synthesized with Islamic values and concepts.

The stories of Scheherazade as told in the Arabian Nights give an idea of life in the court of one of the most famous Abbasid rulers, Caliph Harun ar-Rashid. The tales include those about Sinbad the sailor, 'Ali Baba and the forty thieves, and Aladdin and his magic lamp. They describe the clothing, court life, and government of the period. They show that the role of the grand vizier, or royal minister, in directing state affairs came from Persian administrative practices. (see also Arabian Nights in "Iraqi Mythology: Arabian Nights" in Site Index or run a search for "Arabian Nights" in Iraq Homepage search engine)

The splendor of the Abbasid period began to dim as it came under the influence of the Seljuq Turkish empire, centered at Esfahan (now in Iran). Turks in the court at Baghdad assumed powerful administrative positions. The role of the grand vizier also grew, and by the beginning of the 12th century the Abbasid caliph was often only a figurehead. Although the Turks took authority from the caliph, they held his empire together until the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258. The Abbasid caliphate then ended, though a member of the Abbasid clan continued to reign in Egypt. Iraq became a land of small kingdoms.

The Turkish family of Osman eventually gained a foothold in Anatolia and established a principality that became known as the Ottoman Empire. They pushed aside the last Byzantine influence. The Ottomans conquered Baghdad in 1534, sending administrators to deal with what was considered an outlying province of their empire. At times a neighboring dynasty in Iran, the Safavids, attempted to gain control of portions of Iraq, but the area remained under Ottoman control. The Ottoman sultan ruled all of Egypt, Syria, and portions of Arabia, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Ruling Iraq involved maintaining peace with the local Bedouin tribes, many of whom held great power outside the more thickly settled areas. The Ottoman government followed a policy of supporting the principal tribes. Under this policy, Ottoman administrators gave payments to certain influential sheikhs, for which these tribal leaders were expected to keep the peace and not raid the cities. These payments maintained the system for hundreds of years.

At the end of the 19th century some factions in the Ottoman regime began to support policies that alienated ethnic groups within the empire. One of these groups, the Young Turks, supported the supremacy of Turks and the Turkish language. When they came to power, they sent administrators who often treated non-Turks as second-class citizens to the various provinces, including Iraq. Both urban and rural Iraqis opposed these policies, and some of the country's intellectuals began making plans to break away from the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottomans sided with the Germans in World War I. The British, who wanted to protect their lifeline to India through the Middle East, established a protectorate over Egypt and supported the Hashemite sharifs in Mecca and Medina in their revolt against the Ottomans. The British also sent an expeditionary force from India to Iraq, not only to ensure their position in the Middle East, but also to protect their interests in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British force landed at Al Faw in November 1914 and advanced to Al Kut, where it was surrounded by Turkish troops and urged to surrender. T.E. Lawrence, later known as Lawrence of Arabia, made an unsuccessful attempt to buy the release of the besieged British force from the Turkish commander. The British troops finally surrendered to the Turkish force in April 1916. However, the British sent more troops and occupied Baghdad in March 1917.

At the end of the war, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a mandate to administer Iraq until it established its own government. Many Iraqis resented the British, and tribal rebellions broke out in northern Iraq in 1920. The British reacted by placing a member of the Hashemite family, Ali ibn Husayn, on the throne as King Faisal I in 1921.

In 1931 oil reserves in Iraq were exploited by an agreement signed by the Iraqi government and the Iraq Petroleum Company, an internationally owned organization composed of Royal-Dutch Shell, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, French oil companies, and the Standard Oil companies of New York and New Jersey. The agreement granted the Iraq Petroleum Company the sole right to develop the oil fields of the Mosul region, in return for which the company guaranteed to pay the Iraqi government annual royalties. Iraq gained independence in 1932. In 1934 the company opened an oil pipeline from Mosul to Tripoli, Lebanon, and a second one to Haifa, in what is now Israel, was completed in 1936.

In 1936 Iraq, under King Ghazi, began to move toward a general alliance with the other nations of the Arab world in forming the Pan-Arab movement. A treaty of nonaggression, reaffirming a fundamental Arab kinship, was signed with the king of Saudi Arabia in the same year. In April 1939 King Ghazi was killed in an automobile accident, leaving his three-year-old son the titular king, as King Faisal II, under a regency.

Throughout 1945 and 1946 the Kurdish tribes of northeastern Iraq were in a state of unrest, supported, it was believed, by the USSR. The British, fearing Soviet encroachment on the Iraqi oil fields, moved troops into Iraq. In 1947 Said began to advocate a new proposal for a federated Arab state. This time he suggested that Transjordan (present-day Jordan) and Iraq be united, and he began negotiations with the king of Transjordan regarding the effectuation of his proposal. In April 1947 a treaty of kinship and alliance was signed by the two kingdoms, providing for mutual military and diplomatic aid.

In September 1947 Britain announced its intention to give up the Palestine mandate on April 15 1948. The Zionists, eager to establish a new state, implimented their seizure for most of Palestine via the terrorist Irgun and Stern gang, now collaborating with the Haganah, in what was called the Plan Dalet. Attacks were launched on strategically situated Arab villages whose inhabitants were forced to flee land that their families had occupied for centuries. An Arab Liberation Army of some 3000 volunteers tried to perserve the status quo but were unable to resist the Zionist forces. Arab morale collapsed in the face of this Zionist offensive. Irgunists had massacred 250 inhabitants of the Deir Yasin village on May 10, 1948. Soon the Zionists, in direct contravention of the terms of the UN-sponsored transitional period, had taken Tiberias, Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and most of Arab Jerusalem. The last British high commissioner, quick to wash his hands of the whole affair, left Palestine on May 14th and the mandate was at an end.

Following the partition of Palestine in May 1948, five Arab armies including Iraq massed on its frontiers, determined to restore the Palestinian land to its traditional Arab owners. The apparent Arab unity in fact disguised deep divisions; there was no overall command structure and the various Arab forces were incapable of acting in concert. With massive American assistance to the Israeli forces, the confrontation ended in January 1949, by which time only a fifth of the land area of Palestine remained in Arab lands, and the number of Arabs in the territory conquered by Israel had fallen by between 700,000 and 750,000.

UN Resolutions were passed affirming the right of all Arab refugees to return to their homeland or receive adequate compensation for the loss of their property and it was on the understanding that Israel would observe such resolutions that it was admitted to the UN on May 11th, 1949. However, Israel - insisting that the rights of refugees could only be considered as part of a general peace settlement - guaranteed that the impasse would be complete. Now half of the Palestinian Arabs had become victims of the cavalier British surrender of the mandate and UN machinations that took too little account of local ethnic history or the need for a settlement that would be likely to secure peace for future generations.

Iraq would continue to aid the Palestinians in their struggle against their Israeli oppressors in the Sinai campaign of 1956, the 1967 Six-Day war, and also in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

As an independent nation, Iraq was a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system until 1958, when a group of army officers led a revolt that overthrew the government. The young Hashemite monarch, King Faisal II, and the regent, Crown Prince Abd allah, were both assassinated. Iraq was then declared a republic by its new leader, Brigadier Abdul Karim Kassem (known as "il-Za`im").

In June 1960, following the termination of the British protectorate over the emirate of Kuwait, Iraq claimed the area, asserting that Kuwait had been part of the Iraqi state at the time of its formation. British forces entered Kuwait in July at the invitation of the Kuwaiti ruler, and the UN Security Council declined the Iraqi request to order their withdrawal.

On the domestic front, other members of the group that had led the revolt against King Faisal II also sought power. A new organization, the Arab Socialist Resurrection Party, known as the Bath party, persuaded the army that Kassem should be overthrown. In 1963 the leader of the Bath party, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, overthrew Kassem and established the rule of the National Council for Revolutionary Command with a non-Bathist president, Abdul Salam Muhammad Arif. Kassem was executed.

In 1965 a conflict broke out between opposing groups of Bathists in the council. One group wanted a union with Egypt, and the other favored an alliance with Syria. An attempted plot against Arif failed, but he later died in a helicopter accident. The National Defense Council then elected his brother, Abdul Rahman Arif, president.

In July 1968 General Abdul Rahman Arif's government was overthrown, and Major General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a former premier, was appointed head of the Revolutionary Command Council.

Under Bakr conflicts intensified between the government and the Kurds. During the late 1920s Iraq and Iran had cooperated in controlling the Kurds, who lived on both sides of the border between the two countries. After the 1958 coup in Iraq, each country began to support Kurdish rebels in the other's territory. In 1974 the Iraqi army decided to move into the northern province against the Kurdish rebels, who wanted to overthrow the new Iraqi regime. In March 1975 Iraq reached an agreement with Iran to settle the conflict. Many Kurds fled to Iran. Bakr's regime strengthened Iraq's ties with the Soviet Union, which had provided assistance in the war against the Kurds.

The positions of individual Arab countries with regard to Israel caused some friction between Iraq and its neighbors. In 1971 Iraq closed its border with Jordan and called for its expulsion from the Arab League because of Jordan's efforts to crush the Palestinian liberation movement operating inside its borders. From 1972 to 1975 Iraq fully nationalized and compensated all foreign oil companies operating within its borders. The country enjoyed a massive increase in oil revenues starting in late 1973 when international petroleum prices began a steep rise. The discovery of major oil deposits in the vicinity of Baghdad was announced publicly in 1975. Iraq aided Syria with troops and matériel during the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Calling for military action against Israel, Iraq denounced the cease-fire that ended the 1973 conflict and opposed the interim agreements negotiated by Egypt and Syria with Israel in 1974 and 1975.

In early 1974 heavy fighting erupted in northern Iraq between government forces and Kurdish nationalists, who rejected as inadequate a new Kurdish autonomy law based on a 1970 agreement. The Kurds, led by Mustafa al-Barzani, received arms and other supplies from Iran. After Iraq agreed in early 1975 to make major concessions to Iran in settling their border disputes, Iran halted aid to the Kurds, and the revolt was dealt a severe blow. In July 1979 President Bakr was succeeded by General Saddam Hussein at-takriti, a Sunni Muslim and fellow member of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, who immediately rounded up dozens of officials on charges of treason (see Hussein, Saddam). Tension between the Iraqi government and the revolutionary regime in Iran increased during 1979, when unrest among Iranian Kurds spilled over into Iraq. Sectarian religious animosities exacerbated the conflict (see Iran Iraq Conflict). In September 1980 Iraq declared its 1975 agreement with Iran, which Hussein had negotiated, null and void and claimed authority over the entire disputed Shatt al Arab estuary. The quarrel flared into a full-scale war (see Iran Iraq War). Iraq quickly overran a large part of the Arab-populated province of Khuzestan (Khuzistan) in Iran and destroyed the Abadan refinery.

On June 7, 1981 the Osirak nuclear reactor was bombed by Israeli pilots flying F-16s and relying on American assistance in what was known as Operation Babylon. The CIA supplied the Israelis with satellite reconnaissance photographs that were vital to the success of the misssion. The raid was skilfully planned. When the Israeli pilots were in Jordanian airspace they conversed in Saudi-accented Arabic and informed Jordanian air controllers that they were a Saudi patrol gone astray; over Saudi Arabia they pretended to be Jordanians. The Israeli raid was almost universally condemned, with the new French premier, Francois Mitterrand, one of the first to protest. There were hundreds of French workers, and other foreign nationals at the plant when it was bombed; one Frenchman was killed. Washington's support for the raid was undisguised, with President Jimmy Carter later happy to admit US support for this and other controversial Israeli initiatives.

A cease-fire to the Iran-Iraq war was declared in August 1988.

In July 1990 Iraq accused the former British protectorate of Kuwait of overproducing and stealing petroleum from a disputed oil field in violation of OPEC's regulations and quotas (see Iraqi Grievances). After talks failed in early August, and with assurance by the US Ambassador to Iraq that the US has 'no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait' (in what has come to be known as IraqGate), Iraqi troops invaded and annexed the country. The United Nations Security Council imposed a ban on all trade with Iraq (UN Sanctions), and a massive buildup of troops and weapons began in Saudi Arabia, as a coalition of nations, led almost entirely by the United States, prepared for an $85 billion crusade to remove Iraq from Kuwait and defend Saudi Arabia (i.e., future American oil). When the Jan. 15, 1991, Security Council deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait expired, a coalition of 37 nations had troops, planes, or ships (many of which were almost exclusively from the U.S.) engaged in the Persian Gulf War.

The official war with Iraq ended in a ground assault on February 27, 1991 after a 100-hour ground war. Iraq was forced to accept the UN requirements to identify for destruction all chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles, and material usable in nuclear weapons. Most of these biowarfare programs were supplied by the west and run by British and European technical advisors for use against Iran. When Iraq's gas and germ weapons were targetted against Muslims, the west was silent and obviously had no objection.

In 1993 UN officials announced that they had completed dismantling Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare capability, prompting calls by Iraq for an end to the UN-sponsored trade embargo. In June 1993 the United States launched a widely criticized cruise missile attack against Iraq in retaliation for a reported assassination plot against former U.S. president George Bush.

In October 1994 the United States, with help from Britain and France, deployed about 40,000 troops and more than 600 aircraft in the Persian Gulf region in response to a so-called "buildup" of Iraqi troops along the Kuwaiti border, which was denied by many US service personal and never officially confirmed. In November the Iraqi President signed a decree formally accepting Kuwait's sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity. The decree effectively ended Iraq's claim to Kuwait as a provincial territory.

In 1994 internal resistance was crushed within Iraq by an economic embargo of the Kurdish-populated north and a military campaign against Shiite Muslim rebels in the southern marshlands. The Shiites were quickly quieted, but the crisis in Kurdistan, which had long suffered from internal rivalries, was prolonged. Kurds had often disputed over land rights, and as their economic and political security deteriorated in the early 1990s, the conflicts became more extreme. In May 1994 supporters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) clashed with supporters of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), leaving 300 people dead. Over the next two years the PUK and KDP fought several more times, eventually devolving into a state of civil war. In August 1996, leaders of the KDP asked Iraqi president Saddam Hussein to intervene in the war. Hussein sent at least 30,000 troops into the "UN-protected" Kurdish region (see the Kurds), capturing the PUK stronghold of Irběl. The KDP was immediately installed in power. The United States responded with two missile strikes against southern Iraq, but in early September Iraq again helped KDP fighters, this time taking the PUK stronghold of As Sulaymaněyah.

The economic crisis in the rest of Iraq continued to worsen in 1995 and 1996. Prices were high, food and medicine shortages were rampant, and the free-market (unofficial) exchange rate for the dinar was in severe decline. In April 1995 the UN Security Council voted unanimously to allow Iraq to sell limited amounts of oil to meet its urgent humanitarian needs. Iraq initially rejected the plan, but later accepted it in 1996.

In 1998, after nearly eight years of full-time inspections and the supervised destruction of missiles, manufacturing plants, warheads and stores of chemical weapons, the United States still refused to lift sanctions on the grounds that somewhere in this country something may be hidden. Then secretary of state, Madeleine Albright made an official, public speech in which she stated plainly and explicitly that the sanctions were not going to be lifted no matter how cooperative the Iraqis are, no matter what proof there is that they have no weapons of mass destruction for as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power, this speech was confirmed in a message to Congress by the President. In short, the inspections were just a pretense for the removal of the Iraqi president.

The so-called 'UN arms inspectors' were utilized for US and Israeli intelligence which the Clinton Administration used in an attempt to assassinate the Iraqi President with missle strikes, some of which involved dropping concrete-filled bombs on Iraq. Iraq howerver, did not halt UN inspections. Since the Americans on the team were not acting in good faith the Iraqi government did not allow them to participate, the inspections could continue without the Americans.

Despite the fact that the UN could have continued the inspections while protesting the exclusion of the Americans, it chose to halt them instead. If the UN was genuily concerned about Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction, why did it halt inspections? The obvious inference to be drawn is that the US/UK controlled United Nations, despite its statements to the contrary, clearly does not believe that Iraq has any weapons of mass destruction. The removal of the Iraqi President is the true underlying motive for its actions and policies.

Iraq's people have suffered horribly from UN (i.e., US-British) sanctions, and from Saddam's stubborn refusal to allow Washington to control Iraq through the biased `UN arms inspectors.' According to UNICEF (the United Nations Childrens Fund) and Dennis Halliday former head of the Oil for Food Program who resigned in protest of the sanctions, 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a direct result of more than a decade this embargo. When asked about the sanctions, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright memorably replied `it is a price worth paying.'

An unofficial war against the civilian population of Iraq continues through the sustained blockade of medicine and food by UN Sanctions as well as via US/UK weekly bombings in the north and south of the country. As a result, 1.5 million Iraqies have died since 1991 with 250 dying daily (mostly under the age of 5). The ongoing US war against Iraq costs an estimated $27 billion a year. The murder of Iraqi civilians with the resultant strengthening of the oppressive Iraqi regime continues to its 11th year as of 2001.