Iraq

Iraq is a country in the Middle East (or Western Asia), sharing borders with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Jordan and Turkey. It has two main rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates; Baghdad, the capital, is at their confluence.

Classical

In classical times, Iraq's main region was known as Mesopotamia (Greek: "between the rivers"), and the civilizations that populated it as far back as 5,000 BCE were responsible for many early intellectual advances.

Control of the Muslim world moved to Baghdad, with the rise of the Abbasid Dynasty in 750; it maintained control until overthrown by Mongols in 1517.

British rule

The modern boundaries of Iraq were defined in the 1920s, when the British joined three former districts of the Ottoman Empire. Iraq had been occupied by Britain during World War I and, in 1920, the country was declared a League of Nations mandate under UK administration. In stages over the next dozen years, Iraq attained its independence as a kingdom in 1932.

While the classic Mesopotamia did correspond to one of the Ottoman "governorates", the British-defined state put together three provinces of distinct religious/ethnic majority, with no Iraqi identity:

• Baghdad governorate: Sunni Arabs in the center, around Baghdad
• Basra governorate: Shi'a Arabs in the south
• Mosul governorate: Kurdish people, ethnically Persian and largely Sunni, in the north

The first large-scale petroleum strikes were at Masjid-i Suleiman, in 1908, in Mosul governorate. It was approximately at the same time when oil became a critical world commodity; when the Royal Navy made every other battleship in the world obsolete with HMS Dreadnought (1905), one of its innovation was the movement from coal to oil fuel.

Social structures

There has been no strong Iraqi identity. The most fundamental identity, for most Iraqis, is tribal, described as a more significant identification than the usual split into Kurdish, Sunni, and Shia. David Kilcullen has observed that "Iraqi tribes are not somehow separate, out in the desert, or remote: rather, they are powerful interest groups that permeate Iraqi society". More than 85% of Iraqis claim some form of tribal affiliation; tribal identity is a parallel, informal but powerful sphere of influence in the community.

Iraqi tribal leaders represent a competing power center, and the tribes themselves are a parallel hierarchy that overlaps with formal government structures and political allegiances. Most Iraqis wear their tribal selves beside other strands of identity (religious, ethnic, regional, socio-economic) that interact in complex ways, rendering meaningless the facile division into Sunni, Shi’a and Kurd. The reality of Iraqi national character is much more complex than that, and tribal identity plays an extremely important part in it, even for urbanized Iraqis.

Independence

Iraq's monarchy was overthrown in 1958; the Baa'th party overthrew the existing government in 1963, and Saddam Hussein rose to strict control of the Baa'th in 1979, with state control achieved by a complex set of police and intelligence organizations. In the last several decades, Iraq has been involved in three major wars:

• Iran-Iraq War between 1980 and 1988, triggered by an Iraqi invasion of Iran;
• Gulf War, fought by a United Nations authorized coalition after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq;
• Iraq War, begun by a US-led coalition in 2003.

Iraq has since become a federal parliamentary republic composed of 18 governorates with both a president and a prime minister.