Communications: Telephones: main lines in
use: 1.547 million (2005); mobile cellular: 10.9 million (2007).
Radio broadcast stations: after 17 months of unregulated media
growth, there are approximately 80 radio stations on the air inside
Iraq (2004). Television broadcast stations: 21 (2004).
Internet hosts: 3 Internet users: 36,000 (2007).
Transportation: Railways: total: 2,272 km
(2006). Highways: total: 45,550 km; paved: 38,399 km; unpaved:
7,151 km (1999). Waterways: 5,279 km (not all navigable); note:
Euphrates River (2,815 km), Tigris River (1,895 km), and Third River
(565 km) are principal waterways (2006). Ports and harbors: Al
Basrah, Khawr az Zubayr, Umm Qasr. Airports: 110 (2007).
International disputes: coalition forces
assist Iraqis in monitoring boundary security; Iraq's lack of a
maritime boundary with Iran prompts jurisdiction disputes beyond the
mouth of the Shatt al Arab in the Persian Gulf; Turkey has expressed
concern over the status of Kurds in Iraq.
Iraq, a triangle of mountains, desert, and fertile river valley, is
bounded on the east by Iran, on the north by Turkey, on the west by Syria
and Jordan, and on the south by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It is twice the
size of Idaho. The country has arid desert land west of the Euphrates, a
broad central valley between the Euphrates and the Tigris, and mountains
in the northeast.
Government
The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein collapsed on April 9, 2003, after
U.S. and British forces invaded the country. Sovereignty was returned to
Iraq on June 28, 2004.
History
From earliest times Iraq was known as Mesopotamia—the land
between the rivers—for it embraces a large part of the alluvial
plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
An advanced civilization existed by 4000 B.C. Sometime after 2000 B.C. the land became the center of the ancient
Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Mesopotamia was conquered by Cyrus the
Great of Persia in 538 B.C. and by Alexander in
331 B.C. After an Arab conquest in
637–640, Baghdad became the capital of the ruling caliphate. The
country was cruelly pillaged by the Mongols in 1258, and during the 16th,
17th, and 18th centuries was the object of repeated Turkish-Persian
competition.
Nominal Turkish suzerainty imposed in 1638 was replaced by direct
Turkish rule in 1831. In World War I, Britain occupied most of Mesopotamia
and was given a mandate over the area in 1920. The British renamed the
area Iraq and recognized it as a kingdom in 1922. In 1932, the monarchy
achieved full independence. Britain again occupied Iraq during World War
II because of its pro-Axis stance in the initial years of the war.
Iraq became a charter member of the Arab League in 1945, and Iraqi
troops took part in the Arab invasion of Palestine in 1948.
At age 3, King Faisal II succeeded his father, Ghazi I, who was killed
in an automobile accident in 1939. Faisal and his uncle, Crown Prince
Abdul-Illah, were assassinated in July 1958 in a swift revolutionary coup
that ended the monarchy and brought to power a military junta headed by
Abdul Karem Kassim. Kassim reversed the monarchy's pro-Western policies,
attempted to rectify the economic disparities between rich and poor, and
began to form alliances with Communist countries.
Kassim was overthrown and killed in a coup staged on March 8, 1963, by
the military and the Baath Socialist Party. The Baath Party advocated
secularism, pan-Arabism, and socialism. The following year, the new
leader, Abdel Salam Arif, consolidated his power by driving out the Baath
Party. He adopted a new constitution in 1964. In 1966, he died in a
helicopter crash. His brother, Gen. Abdel Rahman Arif, assumed the
presidency, crushed the opposition, and won an indefinite extension of his
term in 1967.
Arif's regime was ousted in July 1968 by a junta led by Maj. Gen. Ahmed
Hassan al-Bakr of the Baath Party. Bakr and his second-in-command, Saddam Hussein, imposed
authoritarian rule in an effort to end the decades of political
instability that followed World War II. A leading producer of oil in the
world, Iraq used its oil revenues to develop one of the strongest military
forces in the region.
On July 16, 1979, President Bakr was succeeded by Saddam Hussein, whose
regime steadily developed an international reputation for repression,
human rights abuses, and terrorism.
A long-standing territorial dispute over control of the Shatt-al-Arab
waterway between Iraq and Iran broke into full-scale war on Sept. 20,
1980, when Iraq invaded western Iran. The eight-year war cost the lives of
an estimated 1.5 million people and finally ended in a UN-brokered
cease-fire in 1988. Poison gas was used by both Iran and Iraq.
In July 1990, President Hussein asserted spurious territorial claims on
Kuwaiti land. A mediation attempt by Arab leaders failed, and on Aug. 2,
1990, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait and set up a puppet government. The UN
unsuccessfully imposed trade sanctions against Iraq to pressure it to
withdraw. On Jan. 18, 1991, UN forces, under the leadership of U.S.
general Norman Schwarzkopf, launched the Gulf War (Operation Desert
Storm), liberating Kuwait in less than a week.
The war did little to dwarf Iraq's resilient dictator. Rebellions by
both Shiites and Kurds, encouraged by the U.S., were brutally crushed. In
1991, the UN set up a northern no-fly zone to protect Iraq's Kurdish
population; in 1992 a southern no-fly zone was established as a buffer
between Iraq and Kuwait and to protect Shiites.
The UN Security Council imposed sanctions beginning in 1990 that barred
Iraq from selling oil except in exchange for food and medicine. The
sanctions against Iraq failed to crush its leader but caused catastrophic
suffering among its people—the country's infrastructure was in
ruins, and disease, malnutrition, and the infant mortality rate
skyrocketed.
The UN weapons inspections team mandated to ascertain that Iraq had
destroyed all its nuclear, chemical, biological, and ballistic arms after
the war was continually thwarted by Saddam Hussein. In Nov. 1997, he
expelled the American members of the UN inspections team, a standoff that
stretched on until Feb. 1998. But in Aug. 1998, Hussein again put a halt
to the inspections. On Dec. 16, the United States and Britain began
Operation Desert Fox, four days of intensive air strikes. From then on,
the U.S. and Britain conducted hundreds of air strikes on Iraqi targets
within the no-fly zones. The sustained low-level warfare continued
unabated into 2003.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President Bush began
calling for a “regime change” in Iraq, describing the nation
as part of an “axis of evil.” The alleged existence of weapons
of mass destruction, the thwarting of UN weapons inspections, Iraq's
alleged links to terrorism, and Saddam Hussein's despotism and human
rights abuses were the major reasons cited for necessitating a preemptive
strike against the country. The Arab world and much of Europe condemned
the hawkish and unilateral U.S. stance. The UK, however, declared its
intention to support the U.S. in military action. On Sept. 12, 2002, Bush
addressed the UN, challenging the organization to swiftly enforce its own
resolutions against Iraq, or else the U.S. would act on its own. On Nov.
8, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution imposing
tough new arms inspections on Iraq. On Nov. 26, new inspections of Iraq's
military holdings began.
The UN's formal report at the end of Jan. 2003 was not promising, with
chief weapons inspector Hans Blix lamenting that “Iraq appears not
to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament
that was demanded of it.” While the Bush administration felt the
report cemented its claim that a military solution was imperative, several
permanent members of the UN Security Council—France, Russia, and
China—urged that the UN inspectors be given more time to complete
their task. Bush and Blair continued to call for war, insisting that they
would go ahead with a “coalition of the willing,” if not with
UN support. All diplomatic efforts ceased by March 17, when President Bush
delivered an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave the country within 48
hours or face war.
On March 20, the war against Iraq began at 5:30 A.M. Baghdad time (9:30 P.M.
EST, March 19) with the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. By April
9, U.S. forces took control of the capital, signaling the collapse of
Saddam Hussein's regime. Although the war had been officially declared
over on May 1, 2003, Iraq remained enveloped in violence and chaos. Iraqis
began protesting almost immediately against the delay in self-rule and the
absence of a timetable to end the U.S. occupation. In July, the U.S.
administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, appointed an Iraqi governing
council.
Months of searching for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction yielded no
hard evidence, and both administrations and their intelligence agencies
came under fire. There were also mounting allegations that the existence
of these weapons was exaggerated or distorted as a pretext to justify the
war. In fall 2003, President Bush recast the rationale for war, no longer
citing the danger of weapons of mass destruction, but instead describing
Iraq as “the central front” in the war against terrorism. A
free and democratic Iraq, he contended, would serve as a model for the
rest of the Middle East.
Continued instability in 2003 kept 140,000 American troops (at a cost
of $4 billion a month), as well as 11,000 British and 10,000 coalition
troops in Iraq. The U.S. launched several tough military campaigns to
subdue Iraqi resistance, which also had the effect of further alienating
the populace. The rising violence prompted the Bush administration to
reverse its Iraq policy in Nov. 2003: the transfer of power to an interim
government would take place in July 2004, much earlier than originally
planned.
After eight months of searching, the U.S. military captured Saddam
Hussein on Dec. 13. The deposed leader was found hiding in a hole near his
hometown of Tikrit and surrendered without a fight. In Dec. 2006, he was
executed by hanging, found guilty of crimes against humanity for the
execution of 148 Shiite men and boys from the town of Dujail. He was
executed before being tried for innumerable other crimes associated with
his rule.
In Jan. 2004, the CIA's chief weapons inspector, David Kay, stated that
U.S. intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction “was
almost all wrong.” When the final report on the existence of these
weapons in Iraq was issued in Oct. 2004, Kay's successor, Charles Duelfer,
confirmed that there was no evidence of an Iraqi weapons production
program.
The turmoil and violence in Iraq increased throughout 2004. Civilians,
Iraqi security forces, foreign workers, and coalition soldiers were
subject to suicide bombings, kidnappings, and beheadings . By April, a
number of separate uprisings had spread throughout the Sunni triangle and
in the Shiite-dominated south. In September alone there were 2,300 attacks
by insurgents. In October, U.S. officials estimated there were between
8,000 and 12,000 hard-core insurgents and more than 20,000 “active
sympathizers.” Loosely divided into Baathists, nationalists, and
Islamists, all but about 1,000 were thought to be indigenous fighters.
Reconstruction efforts, hampered by bureaucracy and security concerns,
had also fallen far short of U.S. expectations: by September, just 6% ($1
billion) of the reconstruction money approved by the U.S. Congress in 2003
had in fact been used. Electricity and clean water were below prewar
levels, and half of Iraq's employable population was still without work.
In April, the U.S. reversed its policy of banning Baath Party officials
from positions of responsibility—the U.S. had fired all high-ranking
members and disbanded the Iraqi army, affecting about 400,000 positions,
depleting Iraq of its skilled workforce, and further embittering the Sunni
population.
In late April, the physical and sexual abuse and humiliation of Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad came to light when photographs
were released by the U.S. media. The images sparked outrage around the
world. In August, the Schlesinger report's investigation into Abu Ghraib
(the furthest reaching of many Pentagon-sponsored reports on the subject)
called the prisoner abuse acts of “brutality and purposeless
sadism,” rejected the idea that the abuse was simply the work of a
few aberrant soldiers, and asserted that there were “fundamental
failures throughout all levels of command, from the soldiers on the ground
to Central Command and to the Pentagon.”
On June 28, 2004, sovereignty was officially returned to Iraq. Former
exile and Iraqi Government Council member Iyad Allawi became prime
minister of the Iraqi interim government, and Ghazi al-Yawar, a Sunni
Muslim, was chosen president.
On July 9, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a unanimous
bipartisan “Report on Pre-War Intelligence on Iraq,”
concluding that “most of the major key judgments” on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction were “either overstated, or were not
supported by, the underlying intelligence report.” The report also
stated that there was no “established formal relationship”
between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The following week, Britain's Butler
report on pre-Iraq intelligence echoed the American findings.
Iraq's Jan. 30, 2005, elections to select a 275-seat national assembly
went ahead as scheduled, and a total of 8.5 million people voted,
representing about 58% of eligible Iraqis. A coalition of Shiites, the
United Iraq Alliance, received 48% of the vote, the Kurdish parties
received 26% of the vote, and the Sunnis just 2%—most Sunni leaders
had called for a boycott. In April, Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, became
president, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a religious Shiite, prime minister. The
elections, however, did not stem the insurgency, which grew increasingly
sectarian during 2005 and predominantly involved Sunni insurgents
targeting Shiite and Kurdish civilians in suicide bombings. The death toll
for Iraqi civilians is estimated to have reached 30,000 since the start of
the war.
By December 2005, more than 2,100 U.S. soldiers had died in Iraq and
more than 15,000 had been wounded. The absence of a clear strategy for
winning the war beyond “staying the course” caused Americans'
support for Bush's handling of the war to plummet. The U.S. and Iraqi
governments agreed that no firm timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.
troops should be set, maintaining that this would simply encourage the
insurgency. Withdrawal would take place as Iraqi security forces grew
strong enough to assume responsibility for the country's stability.
“As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down,” Bush stated.
But the training of Iraqi security forces went far more slowly than
anticipated. A July 2005 Pentagon report acknowledged that only “a
small number” of Iraqi security forces were capable of fighting the
insurgency without American help.
In Aug. 2005, after three months of fractious negotiations, Iraqi
lawmakers completed a draft constitution that supported the aims of
Shiites and Kurds but was deeply unsatisfactory to the Sunnis. In October
the constitutional referendum narrowly passed, making way for
parliamentary elections on Dec. 15 to select the first full-term,
four-year parliament since Saddam Hussein was overthrown. In Jan. 2006,
election results were announced: the United Iraqi Alliance—a
coalition of Shiite Muslim religious parties that had dominated the
existing government—made a strong showing, but not strong enough to
rule without forming a coalition. It took another four months of bitter
wrangling before a coalition government was finally formed. Sunni Arab,
Kurdish, and secular officials continued to reject the Shiite coalition's
nomination for head of state—interim prime minister al-Jaafari, a
religious Shiite considered a divisive figure incapable of forming a
government of national unity. The deadlock was finally broken in late
April when Nuri al-Maliki, who, like Jaafari, belonged to the Shiite Dawa
Party, was approved as prime minister.
On Feb. 23, Sunni insurgents bombed and seriously damaged the Shiites'
most revered shrine in Iraq, the Askariya Shrine in Samarra. The bombings
ignited ferocious sectarian attacks between Shiites and Sunnis. More than
a thousand people were killed over several days, and Iraq seemed poised
for civil war. Hope in Prime Minister Maliki's ability to unify the
country quickly faded when it became clear that he would not abandon his
political ties with Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who led the
powerful Madhi militai. Maliki seemed unwilling or incapable of reining in
the rapidly proliferating Shiite death squads, which have kidnapped,
tortured, and murdered thousands of civilians.
In February, a U.S. Senate report on progress in Iraq indicated that,
despite the U.S. spending $16 billion on reconstruction, every major area
of Iraq's infrastructure was below prewar levels. Incompetence and fraud
characterized numerous projects, and by April the U.S. special inspector
general was pursuing 72 investigations into corruption by firms involved
in reconstruction.
In May a number of news stories broke about a not-yet-released official
military report that U.S. Marines had killed 24 innocent Iraqis “in
cold blood” in the city of Haditha the previous Nov. 19. The alleged
massacre, which included women and children, was said to have been revenge
for a bombing that killed a marine. The marines are also alleged to have
covered up the killings. The military did not launch a criminal
investigation until mid-March, four months after the incident, and two
months after TIME magazine had reported the allegations to the
military. Several additional sets of separate allegations of civilian
murders by U.S. troops have also surfaced.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the
most-wanted terrorist in the country, was killed by a U.S. bomb. Zarqawi
was responsible for many of the most brutal and horrific attacks in Iraq.
But his death seemed to have no stabilizing effect on the country. The UN
announced that an average of more than 100 civilians were killed in Iraq
each day. During the first six months of the year, civilian deaths
increased by 77%, reflecting the serious spike in sectarian violence in
the country. The UN also reported that about 1.6 million Iraqis were
internally displaced, and up to 1.8 million refugees have fled the
country.
At the end of July, the U.S. announced it would move more U.S. troops
into Bagdad from other regions of Iraq, in an attempt to bring security to
the country's capital, which had increasingly been subject to lawlessness,
violence, and sectarian strife. But by October, the military acknowledged
that its 12-week-old campaign to establish security in Baghdad had been
unsuccessful.
In September, a classified National Intelligence Estimate—a
consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, signed off by
Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte—concluded that
the “Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.”
By this time, many authorities characterized the conflict as a civil
war—as one political scientist put it, the level of sectarian
violence is “so extreme that it far surpasses most civil wars since
1945.” The White House, however, continued to reject the term: it
would be difficult to justify the role of American troops in an Iraqi
civil war, which would require the U.S. to take sides.
The increasingly unpopular war and President Bush's strategy of
“staying the course” were believed responsible for the
Republican loss of both Houses of Congress in November mid-term elections,
and for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld immediately
thereafter. In December, the bipartisan report by the Iraq Study Group,
led by former secretary of state James Baker and former Democratic
congressman Lee Hamilton, concluded that “the situation in Iraq is
grave and deteriorating” and “U.S. forces seem to be caught in
a mission that has no foreseeable end.” The report's 79
recommendations included reaching out diplomatically to Iran and Syria and
having the U.S. military intensify its efforts to train Iraqi troops. The
report heightened the debate over the U.S. role in Iraq, but President
Bush kept his distance from it, indicating that he would wait until Jan.
2007 before announcing a new Iraq strategy. On Dec. 31, 2006, the U.S.
death toll in Iraq reached 3,000, and at least 50,000 Iraqi civilians had
died in the conflict—the UN reported that more than 34,000 Iraqis
were killed from the violence in 2006.
In a January 2007 televised address, President Bush announced that a
"surge" of 20,000 additional troops would be deployed to Baghdad to try to
stem the sectarian fighting. He also said Iraq had committed to a number
of "benchmarks," including increasing troop presence in Baghdad and
passing oil-revenue-sharing and jobs-creation plans.
An encouraging development occurred in late February, when the Iraqi
cabinet passed a draft law on oil revenues that called on the government
to distribute oil revenues to regions based on their populations and
allowed regions to negotiate contracts with foreign companies to explore
and develop oil fields. Hopes for an oil revenue law were dashed in
September, however, when reports indicated that the compromise had fallen
apart.
In June, three Iraqi army officials, including Ali Hassan al-Majid, a
cousin of Saddam Hussein who was known as "Chemical Ali, were convicted
and sentenced to death for carrying out the murder of about 50,000 Kurds
in 1988—what was called the Anfal campaign.
The stability of the Iraqi government further deteriorated in August,
when the Iraqi Consensus Front, the largest Sunni faction in Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet, resigned, citing the Shiite-led
government's failure to stem violence by militias, follow through with
reforms, and involve Sunnis in decisions on security. August also saw the
deadliest attack of the war. Two pairs of truck bombs exploded about five
miles apart in the remote, northwestern Iraqi towns of Qahtaniya and
Jazeera. At least 500 members of the minority Yazidi community were killed
and hundreds more are wounded.
A National Intelligence Estimate released in September said the Iraqi
government had failed to end sectarian violence even with the surge of
American troops. The report also said, however, that a withdrawal of
troops would "erode security gains achieved thus far." By September, the
level of fatalities in Iraq had decreased, and President Bush said
progress was indeed being made in Iraq, citing the fact that relative
peace and stability had come to the once restless Anbar Province in large
part because several Sunni tribes had allied themselves with the U.S. in
its fight against radical Sunni militants.
In highly anticipated testimony, Gen. David Petraeus told members of
Senate and House committees in September that the U.S. military needs more
time to meet its goals in Iraq. He said the number of troops in Iraq may
be reduced from 20 brigades to 15, or from 160,000 troops to 130,000,
beginning in July 2008.
On Septmber, 16, 17 Iraqi civilians, including a couple and their
infant, were killed when employees of private security company Blackwater
USA, which was escorting a diplomatic convoy, fired on a car that failed
to stop at the request of a police officer. The killings sparked furious
protests in Iraq, and Prime Minister Maliki threatened to evict Blackwater
employees from Iraq. In November, FBI investigators reported that 14 of
the 17 shootings were unjustified and the guards were reckless in their
use of deadly force.
Although 2007 culminated as the deadliest year in Iraq for U.S.
soldiers, the U.S. military reported in November that for several
consecutive weeks, the number of car bombs, roadside bombs, mines, rocket
attacks, and other violence had fallen to the lowest level in nearly two
years. In addition, the Iraqi Red Crescent reported that some 25,000
refugees (out of about 1.5 million) who had fled to Syria had returned to
Iraq between September and the beginning of December. However, many of
these returning refugees found their homes occupied by squatters. In
addition, previously diverse neighborhoods had become segregated as a
result of the sectarian violence.
On January 8, 2008, Parliament passed the Justice and Accountability
Law, which allows many Baathists, former members of Saddam Hussein's
party, to resume the government jobs they lost after the U.S.-led invasion
of Iraq in 2003. In addition, many former Baathists who will not be
permitted to return to their positions will receive pensions. The measure
creates a new committee to determine if lower-level Baathists are eligible
to be reinstated to their previous posts. The law is the first major
benchmark of political progress reached by the Iraqi government. It was
criticized for being quite vague and confusing, and its many loopholes may
exclude more Baathists from government jobs than it allows.
Parliament passed another round of legislation in February, which
included a law that outlines provincial powers and an election timetable,
a 2008 budget, and an amnesty law that will affect thousands of mostly
Sunni Arab prisoners. A divided Iraqi Presidency Council vetoed the
package, however.
In March, about 30,000 Iraqi troops and police, with air support from
the U.S. and British military, attempt to oust Shiite militias, primarily
the Mahdi Army led by radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr, that control Basra
and its lucrative ports in southern Iraq. The operation fails, and the
Mahdi Army maintains control over much of Basra. Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki is criticized for poorly planning the assault. executed.Fighting
spiills into the Sadr city section of Baghdad. After negotiations with
Iraqi officials, al-Sadr orders his militia to end military action in
exchange for amnesty for his supporters, the release from prison of his
followers who have not been convicted of crimes, and the government's help
in returning to their homes Sadrists who fled fighting. The compromise is
seen as a defeat to Maliki. In addition, more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers
and police officers either refused to participate in the operation or
deserted their posts. The Iraqi government later fires the soldiers who
refused to fight.
