A History of Iraq

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Dawn of Civilization: Mesopotamia
• Chapter 2 Empires of Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria
• Chapter 3 Persian and Hellenistic Rule
• Chapter 4 The Parthian and Sasanian Eras
• Chapter 5 The Arab Conquest and the Rise of Islam
• Chapter 6 Baghdad: The Jewel of the Abbasid Caliphate
• Chapter 7 The Mongol Invasion and Its Aftermath
• Chapter 8 Ottoman Domination
• Chapter 9 The Seeds of Modern Iraq: The British Mandate
• Chapter 10 The Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq
• Chapter 11 The 1958 Revolution and the Republic
• Chapter 12 The Rise of the Ba'ath Party
• Chapter 13 Saddam Hussein's Ascent to Power
• Chapter 14 The Iran-Iraq War
• Chapter 15 The First Gulf War: The Invasion of Kuwait
• Chapter 16 A Decade of Sanctions
• Chapter 17 The 2003 Invasion and the Fall of Saddam
• Chapter 18 The Occupation and Insurgency
• Chapter 19 The Struggle for a New Government
• Chapter 20 Sectarian Violence and Civil Strife
• Chapter 21 The Rise of ISIS
• Chapter 22 The War Against the Islamic State
• Chapter 23 Post-ISIS Iraq: Reconstruction and Challenges
• Chapter 24 The Protest Movement and Political Instability
• Chapter 25 Contemporary Iraq: Hopes for the Future

To write a history of Iraq is to attempt to capture the story of humanity itself. This is no exaggeration. The land that is now Iraq, known to the ancient world as Mesopotamia—"the land between the rivers"—was the cradle of what we call civilization. Long before Rome had a name or the pharaohs of Egypt built their pyramids, the people living on the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were inventing the future. They built the first cities, devised the first system of writing, and composed the first laws. They gazed at the heavens and laid the foundations of astronomy and mathematics, all while wrestling with the same fundamental questions of life, death, justice, and kingship that occupy us today.

This book is a journey through that immense and often tumultuous history. It is a story not of a single, monolithic entity, but of a geographical stage upon which countless acts of a great human drama have been performed. The characters have changed, the empires have risen and fallen, and the very languages spoken on the street have been replaced, yet the stage remains. The narrative of Iraq is one of astonishing creation and equally devastating destruction, of golden ages of intellectual and cultural brilliance followed by dark periods of brutal conquest and internal strife. It is a land of profound paradoxes: a place of origins that has repeatedly been forced to remake itself, a center of global power that has often been the plaything of foreign interests.

The geography of Iraq is the first and most crucial character in its story. The country is dominated by the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, which rise in the mountains of Turkey and flow southeastward towards the Persian Gulf. It was the life-giving water and rich alluvial silt of these rivers that made civilization possible, creating the Fertile Crescent in an otherwise arid region. This fertile plain, however, is bordered by vast deserts to the west and rugged mountains to the east and north, landscapes that have both protected and isolated its inhabitants, and served as highways for armies. This unique position has made Iraq a natural crossroads, a place where people, goods, and ideas from Asia, Africa, and Europe have met, mingled, and often clashed. Its story is inherently transnational, a tale of connections and collisions.

The sheer weight of "firsts" associated with this land is staggering. The Sumerians, emerging around 4000 BCE, gave the world not just the city-state in places like Uruk and Ur, but the wheel, complex irrigation, and, most momentously, cuneiform script, which pressed the wedge-shaped marks of recorded history into wet clay. They were followed by the Akkadians, who created the world's first empire under Sargon the Great, uniting disparate cities under a single ruler. Then came the Babylonians, whose king, Hammurabi, etched one of the earliest and most complete written legal codes into stone for all to see, a landmark in the quest for systematic justice. The war-like Assyrians forged a vast and fearsome empire from their northern heartland, while the Neo-Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II built a capital of legendary splendor.

Yet, the history of Iraq is defined by a relentless cycle of conquest and renewal. Its wealth and strategic location made it an irresistible prize for ambitious neighbors. The Persian Achaemenids, led by Cyrus the Great, absorbed the land into their vast domain in 539 BC. Two centuries later, Alexander the Great marched his armies through the gates of Babylon, bringing Hellenistic culture in his wake. He was followed by a succession of empires—Parthians, Romans, and Persian Sasanians—each leaving their cultural, architectural, and administrative imprint upon the land and its people. This constant influx of new rulers and cultures created a complex, layered society. Ancient Mesopotamian beliefs slowly gave way to Zoroastrianism, Judaism flourished in the wake of the Babylonian exile, and vibrant Christian communities took root long before the arrival of Islam.

The seventh century witnessed a transformation that would redefine the region forever: the Arab conquest and the rise of Islam. Iraq became a heartland of the new Islamic world. The Umayyad caliphs, ruling from distant Damascus, found the region wealthy but often rebellious. It was their successors, the Abbasids, who moved the center of power to Iraq, building a magnificent new capital, Baghdad. For five centuries, Abbasid Baghdad was arguably the center of the world, a hub of science, philosophy, medicine, and art. The House of Wisdom translated the works of the Greeks, Persians, and Indians, preserving ancient knowledge and building upon it with revolutionary discoveries of their own. This was the Islamic Golden Age, and Baghdad was its glorious sun.

But no golden age lasts forever. The Abbasid Caliphate fractured, weakened by internal dissent and breakaway dynasties. The fatal blow came in 1258, when the Mongol hordes of Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, swept across the plains, sacked Baghdad, and destroyed the canal systems that had irrigated the land for millennia. The devastation was absolute, a cataclysm from which Iraq would not fully recover for centuries. The ensuing period saw the region fall under the sway of various Turco-Mongol and Persian dynasties, becoming a battleground between the expanding Ottoman Empire to the west and the Safavid Empire in Persia to the east. By the 17th century, the Ottomans had secured control, and for the next four hundred years, the lands of modern Iraq were administered as the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.

The modern state of Iraq is a distinctly 20th-century invention, born from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. In a series of secret agreements and public declarations, the victorious European powers, primarily Great Britain, drew new lines on the map. The three disparate Ottoman provinces, with their complex mix of Sunni and Shia Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Christians, and Jews, were cobbled together into a single political entity under a British Mandate. This act of geopolitical expediency ignored deep-seated ethnic and sectarian identities, creating a state whose very foundations were fraught with tension. In 1921, the British installed a Hashemite prince, Faisal I, as king, establishing a monarchy that would rule the country until its violent overthrow in 1958.

The discovery of vast oil reserves in 1927 fundamentally altered Iraq's destiny. Oil brought wealth, modernization, and immense strategic importance, but it also proved to be a curse. It concentrated immense power and revenue in the hands of the state, fueling political instability as different factions vied for control of the nation's primary resource. The allure of oil wealth attracted foreign powers, who sought to secure their interests through political and corporate maneuvering, often at the expense of Iraqi sovereignty. The story of oil in Iraq is inseparable from the story of its modern political history, from the initial British-dominated concessions to the nationalization of the industry in the 1970s and the subsequent wars fought, at least in part, over this black gold.

The second half of the 20th century was marked by chronic instability, coups, and revolutions. The 1958 revolution that toppled the monarchy ushered in a period of military rule and intense political infighting. Out of this turmoil, the Arab nationalist Ba'ath Party eventually emerged, seizing power in 1968. This would pave the way for the rise of one of the most consequential and brutal figures in modern Middle Eastern history: Saddam Hussein. His decades-long rule, beginning formally in 1979, was a period of absolute repression at home and aggressive ambition abroad. It encompassed the devastating eight-year war with Iran, the invasion of Kuwait, and the subsequent 1991 Gulf War that pitted Iraq against a U.S.-led international coalition.

The final chapters of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st saw Iraq descend into a new cycle of suffering. A decade of crippling international sanctions following the Gulf War impoverished the population and hollowed out its once-proud middle class. This was followed by the 2003 invasion led by the United States, which toppled Saddam Hussein's regime but unleashed a perfect storm of occupation, insurgency, and bloody sectarian civil war. The collapse of the state created a vacuum that was filled by a dizzying array of militias, terrorist groups, and political factions, each fighting for power and influence. The rise of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and its seizure of vast swathes of Iraqi territory represented a new nadir, subjecting the population to unimaginable brutality and plunging the nation into another desperate war.

This book will navigate this long and complex timeline, from the Ubaid period to the present day. It will trace the rise and fall of empires, the flourishing of culture, the horrors of war, and the quiet resilience of a people who have endured it all. It is a story that requires an understanding of archaeology, theology, geopolitics, and human nature. Writing such a history is a formidable task. The sources are often fragmented, the narratives contested, and the biases of historians, both ancient and modern, must be carefully navigated. This work aims to present a straightforward and balanced account, acknowledging the complexities and avoiding simple judgments about a history that is anything but simple.

The journey begins with the dawn of civilization in the fertile Mesopotamian plains. We will explore the great empires of Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria, and witness the arrival of the Persians and Greeks. We will walk through the glittering streets of Abbasid Baghdad and ride with the Mongol hordes that laid it to waste. We will examine the long centuries of Ottoman rule, the troubled birth of the modern state under British tutelage, and the turbulent decades of monarchy and republic that followed. We will chart the rise of the Ba'ath Party, the iron-fisted rule of Saddam Hussein, the devastating wars that defined his regime, and the catastrophic aftermath of the 2003 invasion. Finally, we will confront the recent past: the fight against ISIS, the challenges of reconstruction, and the ongoing struggle for a stable and prosperous future.

The history of Iraq is not merely a regional concern. It is a story that has shaped, and been shaped by, the entire world. Its ancient innovations provided the building blocks for countless other cultures. Its medieval scholarship was a crucial bridge between the classical and modern worlds. Its modern conflicts have redrawn the geopolitical map, embroiled global powers, and had consequences that reach far beyond its borders. To understand Iraq is to understand the enduring power of geography, the cyclical nature of empire, the complexities of faith and identity, the intoxicating lure of resources, and the indomitable spirit of a people who, despite millennia of turmoil, continue to write the next chapter of their extraordinary story.

Before Iraq was Iraq, it was Mesopotamia. And before it was Mesopotamia, it was simply a floodplain, a broad, flat, and ferociously hot expanse of silt carved out by two legendary rivers. The Tigris and the Euphrates, born in the mountains of Anatolia, are the temperamental parents of this land. For millennia, they have bestowed the two gifts essential for life in a desert: water and incredibly fertile soil. Each spring, melting snows would swell the rivers, causing them to overflow their banks and deposit a fresh layer of rich alluvial silt across the plain. This annual renewal created a farmer’s paradise, an agricultural potential unmatched in the ancient world. But the rivers were also capricious and violent, capable of wiping out a year's crops and an entire village with sudden, catastrophic floods.

This challenging environment forged a particular kind of people. Survival here was not a matter of passively accepting nature’s bounty, but of actively managing its risks. It demanded ingenuity, cooperation, and a monumental amount of back-breaking labor. The inhabitants of this land had to learn to control the water, to build canals that would lead it to their fields in the dry season and levees that would hold it back during the flood. This constant struggle with the natural world, this need to organize and innovate simply to survive, was the engine that drove the creation of civilization itself. It forced people to live together, to plan, and to create systems of authority and governance.

The first stirrings of this new way of life began long before the first cities. Around 6000 BCE, small farming communities started to dot the plains of northern Mesopotamia, in areas where rainfall was sufficient for agriculture without major irrigation. Archaeologists have given these early cultures names based on the sites where their distinctive pottery was first found: Hassuna, Samarra, and Halaf. The people of the Hassuna culture lived in small villages, farming barley and wheat and raising domesticated animals like sheep, goats, and pigs. Their homes were simple structures of packed mud, and their pottery, though handmade, was a significant technological step forward.

A little to the south, the Samarra culture showed signs of greater social complexity and technological skill. Their pottery was more finely made, and crucially, there is evidence they were beginning to practice simple forms of irrigation, allowing them to push into the more arid lands of central Mesopotamia. This was a pivotal development, a clear step towards mastering the challenging environment of the south. The subsequent Halaf culture, known for its exquisite painted pottery, saw these small communities connected by wider networks of trade and cultural exchange, spreading across a vast area of the Near East.

The real revolution, however, began in the far south, on the blisteringly hot but incredibly fertile alluvial plains near the Persian Gulf. Sometime around 6500 BCE, a new culture emerged, known as the Ubaid. The Ubaid people were the true pioneers of southern Mesopotamia. They perfected the art of irrigation, digging networks of canals that transformed the arid plain into a checkerboard of green, productive fields. This agricultural surplus allowed for larger, more permanent settlements. Ubaid villages grew larger and more populous than any that had come before, laying the essential groundwork for the urban explosion that would follow.

One of the most significant Ubaid sites is Eridu, a place the Sumerians themselves would later regard as the very first city, where kingship descended from heaven. Excavations at Eridu have revealed a sequence of temples, built and rebuilt on the same spot over many centuries. The earliest shrine was a simple, single-room structure of mud brick. Over time, it was replaced by ever larger and more elaborate temples, indicating the growing wealth of the community and the increasing importance of organized religion. These Ubaid temples are the direct ancestors of the great ziggurats that would later dominate the Mesopotamian skyline. The Ubaid period, which lasted for over two millennia, set the stage, creating the agricultural and social foundations upon which the world’s first civilization would be built.

The transition from a world of villages to a world of cities happened during what is known as the Uruk period, lasting from roughly 4000 to 3100 BCE. This era, named after the colossal city of Uruk, witnessed a fundamental transformation in the scale and complexity of human society. Propelled by further advances in agriculture, like the introduction of the seed plow, populations boomed. People began to congregate in unprecedented numbers, and settlements like Uruk swelled from large towns into genuine cities, the first the world had ever seen. By its peak, Uruk may have been home to as many as 40,000 people, with tens of thousands more in its surrounding territories, making it the largest urban area on Earth at the time.

This was more than just a change in size; it was a change in the very nature of human life. The city of Uruk was a bustling, complex organism. It had monumental public architecture, most notably in the Eanna district, dedicated to the goddess Inanna, where enormous temples were decorated with intricate mosaics of colored clay cones. It had a stratified society, with priests and administrators at the top, and a growing class of specialized laborers: artisans, merchants, soldiers, and bureaucrats. Mass production of goods appeared for the first time, evidenced by the ubiquitous and rather drab beveled-rim bowls, which archaeologists believe may have been used to distribute rations to state laborers. This urban revolution saw the establishment of the state, a new form of political organization capable of managing the complex affairs of a large population.

With a complex city-state to manage, the rulers of Uruk faced a novel problem: how to keep track of everything. How do you record tax payments, measure grain surpluses, and administer rations for thousands of workers? The old methods of memory and simple tokens were no longer sufficient. The solution to this administrative headache was one of the most profound inventions in human history: writing. First developed by Sumerian scribes in Uruk around 3200 BCE, the earliest script was a means of recording transactions.

The system, known as cuneiform, began as a series of pictographs, simple drawings of the objects being counted. Scribes would use a reed stylus to press these symbols into tablets of wet clay. Over time, this system evolved. The pictographs became more abstract and stylized, eventually transforming into the characteristic wedge-shaped marks that give cuneiform its name (from the Latin cuneus, meaning "wedge"). Crucially, the system developed from representing objects to representing sounds—a syllabary where signs stood for syllables. This breakthrough allowed for the recording of spoken language, and with it, the expression of complex ideas, laws, stories, and beliefs. History, in the truest sense, had begun.

The people who accomplished all this were the Sumerians. Their precise origin remains a mystery, a subject of endless debate among scholars. Their language was an isolate, unrelated to the Semitic and Indo-European languages of their neighbors. What is certain is that by the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE, they had established a vibrant civilization in southern Mesopotamia, a land they called Sumer. Their world was a collection of fiercely independent city-states. Besides Uruk, cities like Ur, Eridu, Kish, Lagash, and Nippur vied with each other for power, resources, and prestige.

Each city was considered the property of a specific patron god or goddess. The city of Ur belonged to the moon god Nanna; Uruk to the goddess of love and war, Inanna. At the heart of each city stood the god's home, the temple complex, which grew into massive, stepped pyramids known as ziggurats. These were not places of public worship in the modern sense, but sacred precincts, the literal dwelling places of the gods on earth. The entire economic life of the city revolved around the temple, which controlled vast tracts of agricultural land and employed a large portion of the population.

Sumerian society was hierarchical. At the very top was the ensi or lugal—the ruler, who acted as the god's earthly representative, a steward managing the deity's estate. Below him were the priests and priestesses who mediated between the human and divine realms and wielded enormous power. Then came a small elite of scribes, merchants, and skilled artisans. The vast majority of the population were farmers, laborers, and soldiers. At the bottom of the social ladder were slaves, often prisoners of war or individuals who had fallen into debt. Religion permeated every aspect of Sumerian life. They believed the gods had created humanity to be their servants, to toil and provide for them so the deities could rest. The world was filled with powerful, often unpredictable, divine forces, and the purpose of life was to serve and appease them.

The period following the Uruk explosion, from about 2900 to 2350 BCE, is known as the Early Dynastic Period. During this era, the city-state became the dominant political structure. It was a time of remarkable cultural achievement, but also of endemic warfare. The various cities, though sharing a common culture and religion, were locked in a constant struggle for control of land and water rights. This is the era of figures who straddle the line between history and legend, like Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk whose epic quest for immortality is one of the world's first great works of literature. While Gilgamesh's divine parentage and heroic deeds are the stuff of myth, historical evidence suggests he was a real king who reigned in the 26th century BCE and was responsible for building the great walls of Uruk.

The Sumerian King List, a remarkable document that records the rulers of Sumer, presents a sequence of dynasties that held sway from various cities. Though it mixes mythical kings who ruled for tens of thousands of years with historical ones, it reflects the political reality of the time: a system where one city would achieve temporary dominance, or "hegemony," over the others, only to be supplanted by a new rival. Kings like Enmebaragesi of Kish are known from their own inscriptions, lending a firm historical anchor to this period.

The constant warfare spurred military innovation. A fascinating glimpse into this world is provided by the Stele of the Vultures, a monument erected by King Eannatum of Lagash around 2460 BCE to celebrate his victory over the neighboring city of Umma. The carved stone slab depicts scenes of battle in graphic detail. One side shows Eannatum leading a tightly packed phalanx of heavily armed soldiers, their spears bristling from behind a wall of shields as they march over the bodies of their enemies. The other side shows the god of Lagash, Ningirsu, holding the captured soldiers of Umma in a giant net. The stele, one of the earliest known war monuments, is a powerful piece of political propaganda, justifying a territorial dispute over a tract of agricultural land as a divinely ordained victory.

The wealth and sophistication of the Early Dynastic period are nowhere more vividly displayed than in the Royal Cemetery of Ur, excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. The discovery was a sensation, rivaling that of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt. Woolley unearthed some 1,800 graves, but sixteen stood apart, which he identified as "Royal Tombs." These were not simple burials but elaborate multi-chambered tombs filled with breathtaking treasures of gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian.

One of the most spectacular tombs was that of a woman identified by a cylinder seal as Queen Puabi. She was laid to rest adorned with an elaborate golden headdress of beech leaves, rings, and earrings. But the most stunning and disturbing aspect of these tombs was the discovery of what appeared to be mass human sacrifice. In the great pit associated with one tomb, Woolley found the bodies of 74 attendants, mostly women, dressed in fine jewelry and arranged in neat rows. Soldiers, grooms, and musicians accompanied them to the grave. The exact circumstances of their deaths are debated, but it seems these retainers were sacrificed to serve their masters in the afterlife, a stark testament to the immense power wielded by the rulers of Ur.

The Early Dynastic period was the high-water mark of Sumerian civilization as a collection of independent city-states. They had created the city, invented writing, developed complex legal and administrative systems, and produced extraordinary works of art. They had also, through their relentless internal squabbling, created a political landscape that was ripe for conquest. The constant state of war between cities like Lagash and Umma, while producing heroic kings and impressive monuments, ultimately weakened them all. A new kind of political order was about to emerge, one based not on the independence of a single city, but on the unification of the entire land under a single, imperial ruler. The age of the city-state was drawing to a close, and the age of empire was about to dawn.