Iraq

The territory of modern Iraq, the alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, hosted some of the earliest documented urban civilisations in human history. From roughly the fourth millennium BCE, Sumerian city-states such as Uruk, Ur, and Lagash developed cuneiform writing, codified law, and monumental architecture. They were succeeded and absorbed by the Akkadian Empire of Sargon in the twenty-third century BCE, and later by the Old Babylonian kingdom under Hammurabi, whose legal code remains a touchstone of ancient jurisprudence. The Assyrian Empire, centred on Ashur and Nineveh, dominated the region during the first half of the first millennium BCE, before the Neo-Babylonian revival under Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt Babylon as a great capital.

Mesopotamia passed in 539 BCE to the Achaemenid Persians, then to the Macedonians under Alexander the Great, and subsequently to the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian empires, which ruled from Ctesiphon near present-day Baghdad. Arab Muslim armies defeated the Sasanians in the seventh century, and in 762 the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad, which became for several centuries the political and intellectual capital of the Islamic world. The Mongol sack of 1258 ended the Abbasid caliphate and inaugurated a long period of provincial decline under successive Ilkhanid, Jalayirid, Timurid, and Turkmen rulers, before the Ottoman conquest of the sixteenth century incorporated the provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra into the Ottoman Empire.

Following the collapse of Ottoman authority in the First World War, the territory was placed under British mandate by the League of Nations in 1920. The Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq was proclaimed in 1921 with Faisal I on the throne, and formal independence followed in 1932 with admission to the League of Nations. The monarchy was overthrown in the July 1958 revolution led by Abd al-Karim Qasim, which established a republic. A series of coups culminated in the 1968 seizure of power by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, with Saddam Hussein consolidating personal rule by 1979.

The Ba'athist period was marked by the costly Iran, Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and ensuing Gulf War of 1991, and more than a decade of international sanctions. A United States led coalition invaded Iraq in March 2003, deposing Saddam Hussein and dismantling the Ba'athist state. The subsequent occupation gave way to a transitional government and to a permanent constitution approved by referendum in 2005, which established a federal parliamentary republic. The following years were dominated by sectarian violence, the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and, from 2014, the seizure of large areas of northern and western Iraq by the Islamic State, whose territorial defeat was declared in late 2017 with substantial international assistance.

Iraq today is a federal parliamentary republic governed under the 2005 constitution. Executive authority is exercised by a prime minister drawn from the Council of Representatives, while a largely ceremonial president serves as head of state, and the Kurdistan Region in the north enjoys constitutionally recognised autonomy with its own parliament and government. Successive coalition cabinets since 2018 have sought to balance relations with neighbouring states and external partners while addressing reconstruction, public services, and the management of the country's substantial hydrocarbon resources.