The Iraq disarmament crisis was claimed as one of the primary issues that led to the multinational invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003.
Iraq actively researched and employed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from 1962 to 1991, after which it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile and halted its biological and nuclear weapon programs as required by the United Nations Security Council. The fifth president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was internationally condemned for his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and military targets during the Iran–Iraq War. Saddam pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built. After the Gulf War, the United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials; Iraq ceased its chemical, biological and nuclear programs.
In March 2003 the United States government announced that "diplomacy has failed" and that it would proceed with a "coalition of the willing" to rid Iraq under Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction the US and UK claimed it possessed. The 2003 invasion of Iraq began a few days later. Prior to this decision, there had been much diplomacy and debate amongst the members of the United Nations Security Council over how to deal with the situation. This article examines the positions of these states as they changed during 2002–2003.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq began on March 20. On March 18, US President George W. Bush had set a deadline for the ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, to leave the country or face military action. By the time of the ultimatum, political and military preparations for the invasion were well advanced.
Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan, simply called Ansar al-Islam, is a Kurdish Islamist militant and separatist group. It was established in northern Iraq around the Kurdistan Region by Kurdish Islamists who were former Taliban and former Al-Qaeda volunteers, which were coming back from Afghanistan in 2001 after the Fall of Kabul. It was formed with the motive of establishing an Islamic state around the Kurdistan region and protecting Kurds from other armed insurgent groups during the Iraqi insurgency. It imposed strict Sharia in villages it controlled around Byara near the Iranian border.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion began on 20 March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations, in which a United States-led combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded the Republic of Iraq. Twenty-two days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by coalition forces on 9 April after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. This early stage of the war formally ended on 1 May when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in his Mission Accomplished speech, after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, evidence began to emerge of failed attempts by the Iraqi government to bring the conflict to a peaceful resolution.
The Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence was the report by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concerning the U.S. intelligence community's assessments of Iraq during the time leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The report, which was released on July 9, 2004, identified numerous failures in the intelligence-gathering and -analysis process. The report found that these failures led to the creation of inaccurate materials that misled both government policy makers and the American public.
The following lists events in the year 2003 in Iraq.
Events in the year 2002 in Iraq.
The Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations were based on false claims by the United States government alleging that a secretive relationship existed between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda between 1992 and 2003. U.S. president George W. Bush used it as a main reason for invading Iraq in 2003.
Aluminum tubes purchased by the nation of Iraq were intercepted in Jordan in 2001. In September 2002 they were publicly cited by the White House as evidence that Iraq was actively pursuing an atomic weapon. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many questioned the validity of the claim. After the invasion, the Iraq Survey Group determined that the best explanation for the tubes' use was to produce conventional 81-mm rockets; no evidence was found of a program to design or develop an 81-mm aluminum rotor uranium centrifuge.
There are various rationales for the Iraq War that have been used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent hostilities.
Operation Iraqi Freedom 2003 documents are some 48,000 boxes of documents, audiotapes and videotapes that were discovered by the U.S. military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The documents date from the 1980s through the post-Saddam period. In March 2006, the U.S. government, at the urging of members of Congress, made them available online at its website, requesting Arabic translators around the world to help in the translation.
This article is a chronological listing of allegations of meetings between members of al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government, as well as other information relevant to conspiracy theories involving Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
The 2003 United States–British–Spanish Draft Resolution on Iraq was, according to Ambassador John Negroponte, "a resolution to have the Council decide that Iraq is not complying, is out of compliance, with Resolution 1441". Initially introduced on February 24, 2003, and amended on March 7, 2003, the draft set a March 17 deadline for Iraq to demonstrate "full, unconditional, immediate and active cooperation in accordance with its disarmament obligations." The draft was based on information from the Iraqi defector "Curveball," who claimed Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, which Curveball later admitted was untrue. The widely discussed UN resolution was not brought up for formal vote after it became clear that it would not have passed due to opposition from France, Russia, and China. The United States invaded Iraq without UN support on March 20, 2003, initiating the Iraq War.
The legality of the Iraq War is a contested topic that spans both domestic and international law. Political leaders in the US and the UK who supported the invasion of Iraq have claimed that the war was legal. However, many legal experts and other world leaders have argued that the war lacked justification and violated the United Nations charter.
Prior to the Iraq War, the United States accused Iraq of developing weapons of mass destruction and having links with al-Qaeda. In 1991, the United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 was adopted and subsequent UN weapons inspectors were inside Iraq. This period also saw low-level hostilities between Iraq and the United States-led coalition from 1991–2003.
The Iraqi conflict is a series of violent events that began with the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq and deposition of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, followed by the War in Iraq, an armed conflict between Iraq and its allies and the Islamic State. The most recent conflict is the ongoing Islamic State insurgency,
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