Iraq

• 1. Introduction

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  Iraq sits at the very point where human civilization first took hold. Between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a region the ancients called Mesopotamia, the world's earliest cities rose as far back as the 6th millennium BC. People here invented writing, the wheel, the sailboat, mathematics, and the first known law code. They mapped the stars and built calendars. No other patch of earth can claim a denser concentration of human firsts. Yet today, Iraq is a country of over 46 million people still rebuilding from decades of war, sanctions, and internal fracture. How did the cradle of civilization become one of the most contested and damaged nations on earth? And what does its slow, uneven recovery tell us about the weight history places on a country? Those are the questions worth sitting with.

• 2. The Name and Its Layers

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  The sixth-century poet Adi ibn Zayd, writing from the Lakhmid court at al-Hira, used the name al-Iraq in poems that spoke of the "people of Iraq" and the "central area of Iraq", making it one of the earliest documented uses of the toponym. His contemporary Imru al-Qais extended its reach further, writing of "the abundant food of Iraq" and claiming a kingdom stretching "from Iraq to Oman". The name's origins remain genuinely debated. One theory traces it to Uruk, the ancient Sumerian city. A Middle Persian source offers the word erag, meaning lowlands. An Arabic folk etymology reads it as "deeply rooted, well-watered; fertile". As an Arabic word, the letters translate simply as hem, shore, bank, or edge. The tenth-century geographer al-Maqdisi was so committed to the name that he defended his use of Iraq over the older term Babylonia, citing the caliph Abu Bakr himself as a precedent. When the British installed Faisal I as king on the 23rd of August 1921, the country's official English name shifted from Mesopotamia to Iraq. The name has meant different things to different eras, but its roots stretch into a time before Arabic itself was written down.

• 3. Empires Built on Silt

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  Sumer emerged between 6000 and 5000 BC during what archaeologists call the Neolithic Ubaid period, and it is recognized as the world's earliest civilization. The land itself made this possible. The Tigris and Euphrates carry roughly 60 million cubic meters of silt to the delta annually, depositing layers of fertile alluvial soil across the plains. Sumer pioneered urban development, written language, and monumental architecture, and built advanced canal systems to manage the rivers' flow. After Sumer, Iraq's territory became the heartland of the Akkadian, Babylonian, Neo-Assyrian, and Neo-Babylonian empires in succession. When Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, he adopted the title King of Babylon to claim continuity with the traditions he was absorbing. Alexander the Great arrived in 331 BCE, with Babylon surrendering without resistance. Alexander planned to make Babylon his imperial capital, but he died in 323 BCE before that vision was realized, and the city's population was eventually resettled to the new capital at Seleucia. Through all these transitions, Babylonian economic traditions persisted. Merchants continued using the silver shekel. Cuneiform writing and temple institutions kept functioning under Seleucid rulers. Mesopotamia's fertility and administrative sophistication made it too valuable for any empire to simply discard.

• 4. Baghdad and the Golden Age

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  In 762, the Abbasid Caliphate founded Baghdad, and within generations the city became the political, economic, and intellectual center of the Islamic world. The House of Wisdom stood in Baghdad, drawing scholars from across the known world. Iraq under the Abbasids generated the highest state revenues of the entire caliphate, reaching four times the output of Egypt, the second richest province. That wealth flowed from the agricultural productivity of southern Iraq, which Abbasid rulers actively cultivated by restoring and extending canal systems following ancient Mesopotamian precedents. Glazed pottery produced in Iraq during this period was exported as mass-produced commercial goods across the Indian Ocean. The historian al-Masudi preserved stories in which Iraqis debated Egyptians over environmental advantage and mocked legal practices from Mecca, capturing a confident regional identity. That confidence was not to last. In 1258, Mongol forces captured and sacked Baghdad, ending Abbasid political rule and causing destruction on a scale the city had never suffered. Iraq was incorporated into the Ilkhanate as a territorial province. Agricultural production and urban life recovered gradually under Ilkhanid rule, but the region that had once anchored a global empire passed through a succession of competing Turkoman and Mongol dynasties before Shah Ismail I of the Safavid Empire seized Baghdad in 1508.

• 5. Ottoman Iraq and British Rule

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  Sultan Suleiman I conquered Iraq in 1534 and brought it into the Ottoman Empire, where it would remain, with interruptions, for nearly four centuries. Baghdad changed hands multiple times during the Ottoman-Safavid wars of the 16th and 17th centuries before the Treaty of Zuhab in 1639 confirmed lasting Ottoman control. The Ottomans organized the territory into the provinces of Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, and Shahrizor, collectively calling them Hitta-i Irakiyye, meaning the Iraq region. From 1749 to 1831, a Mamluk dynasty of Georgian origin governed Iraq with considerable autonomy while maintaining nominal loyalty to the Ottoman sultan. After their overthrow in 1831, Baghdad reasserted central authority, and later administrators introduced reforms in taxation, land registration, infrastructure, and education that many historians regard as foundations for the modern state. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War changed everything. Britain occupied Baghdad in 1917, and in 1920 formally established the British Mandate of Mesopotamia. Arab forces who had fought against the Ottomans expecting independence found instead that European powers had other plans. The Cairo Conference of 1921, attended by British officials including Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence, installed the exiled Faisal as king. Faisal chose the date of his coronation to coincide with Eid al-Ghadeer, a gesture of solidarity toward the Shia community whose support he needed. By 1932, Iraq gained formal independence and became a member of the League of Nations, though British influence over military affairs and oil rights persisted well beyond that date.

• 6. Coups, Ba'ath, and Saddam

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  On the 14th of July 1958, Brigadier General Abd al-Karim Qasim led a coup that ended the Hashemite monarchy. King Faisal II, Prince Abd al-Ilah, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Said were killed. Qasim's republic redistributed land from large landowners and, in 1961, claimed Kuwait as Iraqi territory, a demand he abandoned only after British troops deployed on the border. He was overthrown by the Ba'ath Party in a coup in February 1963, a government that itself fell in November of the same year, bringing Colonel Abdul Salam Arif to power. The 17th of July Revolution in 1968 brought the Iraqi Ba'ath Party back to power under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, but real authority gradually shifted to his vice-president Saddam Hussein. On the 16th of July 1979, Saddam acceded to the presidency and chairmanship of the Revolutionary Command Council. His government introduced free healthcare, education, and infrastructure investment, nationalized oil in 1972, and promoted women's rights. It also launched the Anfal campaign between 1983 and 1986, killing between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians in response to Kurdish rebellion. The Iran-Iraq War, which Saddam started in September 1980, lasted until 1988 and killed between half a million and 1.5 million people. Two years after that war ended, on the 2nd of August 1990, Iraqi forces invaded and annexed Kuwait as its 19th governorate. A US-led coalition drove them out in a 100-hour ground assault. Sanctions imposed after the invasion reduced Iraq's oil output by 85% in the years that followed the First Gulf War.

• 7. Invasion, ISIS, and the Long Rebuilding

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  On the 20th of March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq. The fall of Baghdad came in the first week of April, and a statue of Saddam was toppled in the capital. The Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi military and expelled Ba'athists from the new government, decisions widely credited with fueling the insurgency that followed. The Shia-Sunni civil war ran from 2006 to 2008. When US troops withdrew in 2011, estimates of Iraqi dead from the war ranged from 151,000 to 1.2 million. Between 2013 and 2017, the Islamic State seized large swaths of territory including Tikrit, Fallujah, and Mosul, displacing an estimated 500,000 civilians from Mosul alone. Around 5,000 Yazidis were killed in ISIS's genocide in Sinjar. In June 2014, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa calling on able-bodied men to join the armed forces against ISIS. The resulting Popular Mobilisation Forces, alongside the US-led coalition and Peshmerga, gradually retook ISIS-held territory. In December 2017 the government declared victory. In October 2022, the Council of Representatives elected Abdul Latif Rashid as president and Mohammed Shia al-Sudani became prime minister. A July 2025 report submitted to the UN Security Council assessed that ISIS is at its weakest in Iraq since it emerged. Water flows in the Tigris and Euphrates were down between 30 and 40% as recently as 2023, and nearly 40% of Iraq has been overtaken by blowing desert sands. The country that first taught humanity to irrigate is now fighting to keep its rivers from running dry.

• 8. Oil, Diversity, and What Remains

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  Iraq holds 143.1 billion barrels of proved oil reserves, placing it third in the world behind Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Oil has traditionally provided about 95% of Iraq's foreign exchange earnings, a concentration that makes the economy fragile to price swings. In 2022, Iraq paid $52.4 billion in war reparations to Kuwait, completing obligations that stretched back more than 30 years to the UN Compensation Commission established after the 1990 invasion. Iraq is also one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse countries in the region. A 2015 European Parliamentary Research Service report estimated the population included 24 million Arabs, 4.7 million Sunni Kurds, 3 million Turkmens, 500,000 Christians, and 500,000 Yazidis, along with smaller communities of Mandaeans, Shabaks, and others. Arabic and Kurdish are both official languages under Article 4 of the 2005 Constitution, and the constitution allows any region to declare additional official languages by referendum. In 2025, the Iraq Development Fund had secured $7 billion in foreign direct investments and signed agreements with countries including the United Kingdom and Japan. In that same year, the Ministry of Planning reported that unemployment dropped from 17% in 2022 to 13% in 2025. Iraq signed a $27 billion energy deal with TotalEnergies aimed at expanding oil production while building renewable energy capacity. The country that invented the calendar is now building toward a target of supplying one-third of its electricity from clean energy by 2030.