Republic of Iraq

Origins & rise

The present Iraqi state was born of the U.S.-led invasion of 20 March 2003, launched by President George W. Bush's administration on the—later disproven—claims that Saddam Hussein retained weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda. The conventional campaign lasted barely three weeks: Baghdad fell on 9 April 2003, symbolized by the toppling of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, and Bush declared major combat over on 1 May. The Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer then governed the country, and its fateful early decisions—notably dissolving the Iraqi army and purging Ba'ath Party members from the state—threw hundreds of thousands of armed, aggrieved men onto the streets and ignited the insurgency that would define the new republic's first decade.

History & key rulers/leaders

Sovereignty was formally transferred to an interim government under Prime Minister Ayad Allawi on 28 June 2004, endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 1546. Elections in January 2005—boycotted by many Sunnis—brought a Shia-Kurdish coalition to power under Ibrahim al-Jaafari, with Jalal Talabani as president, and a permanent constitution was ratified by referendum on 15 October 2005. Nouri al-Maliki became prime minister after the December 2005 elections. The bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra in February 2006 plunged the country into sectarian civil war (2006–2008) between Shia militias and Sunni insurgents led by al-Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in June 2006. The 2007 U.S. "surge" and the Sunni "Awakening" gradually reduced violence; U.S. combat troops departed in August 2010 and the final withdrawal came in December 2011.

Post-withdrawal, Maliki's increasingly sectarian rule alienated Sunnis, and the Islamic State of Iraq revived, exploiting Syria's civil war. In January 2014 it seized Fallujah; on 10 June 2014 it captured Mosul, Iraq's second city, and on 29 June proclaimed a caliphate under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Its atrocities included the Camp Speicher massacre of some 1,700 cadets and the genocide of the Yazidis in Sinjar that August. A U.S.-led coalition intervened from August 2014, and Haider al-Abadi replaced Maliki as premier. Backed by coalition air power, Kurdish Peshmerga, and the Iran-supported Popular Mobilization Forces, Iraqi forces retook Tikrit (2015), Ramadi (2015–16), Fallujah (2016), and finally Mosul in July 2017; Abadi declared final victory over ISIS on 9 December 2017.

Politics since 2018 have been turbulent: mass "Tishreen" protests in October 2019 forced out Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi; a U.S. strike killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad in January 2020; Mustafa al-Kadhimi governed until the October 2021 election and a year-long deadlock produced Mohammed Shia al-Sudani's government in October 2022.

Government, religion & culture

The 2005 constitution made Iraq a federal, parliamentary republic with an Arab Shia majority (roughly 60 percent), Sunni Arab and Kurdish minorities, and an autonomous Kurdistan Region in the north. Politics operates through the muhasasa system, an informal ethnic-sectarian quota dividing posts among Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish parties—an arrangement credited with preventing renewed civil war but blamed for endemic corruption, the core grievance of the 2019 protesters. Iraq's culture is profoundly shaped by its religious heritage: the Shia shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala draw millions of pilgrims annually, while ISIS systematically destroyed ancient sites including the tomb of Jonah in Mosul. The economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on oil, which accounts for the vast majority of government revenue.

Peak & territory

The republic's internationally recognized territory is some 438,000 km². At ISIS's high-water mark in mid-2014, however, the government in Baghdad effectively lost control of about a third of the country—some 56,000 km² containing 4.5 million people—before gradually reconquering it by the end of 2017.

Present status & legacy

Two decades on, Iraq is a fragile but functioning electoral democracy that has survived occupation, civil war, and the ISIS caliphate. ISIS is territorially defeated but persists as a low-level insurgency. The state struggles with powerful Iran-aligned militias, corruption, unemployment, water scarcity, and oil dependence, even as relative stability since 2017 has allowed reconstruction and a tentative reintegration into Arab and regional politics.