| Iraq at the 2014 Asian Beach Games | |
|---|---|
 | |
| IOC code | IRQ |
| NOC | National Olympic Committee of Iraq |
| in Phuket | |
| Medals Ranked 29th |
|
| Asian Beach Games appearances | |
Iraq participated in the 2014 Asian Beach Games in Phuket, Thailand from 14 to 23 November 2014.
| Iraq at the 2014 Asian Beach Games | |
|---|---|
| | |
| IOC code | IRQ |
| NOC | National Olympic Committee of Iraq |
| in Phuket | |
| Medals Ranked 29th |
|
| Asian Beach Games appearances | |
Iraq participated in the 2014 Asian Beach Games in Phuket, Thailand from 14 to 23 November 2014.
| Medals by sport | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sport |  |  |  | Total |
 Muaythai | 0 | 2 | 2 | 4 |
 Sambo | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Total | 0 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| Medals by date | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Day | Date | | | | Total |
| –1 | 12 Nov | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| 0 | 13 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 14 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | 15 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | 16 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 4 | 17 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 5 | 18 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6 | 19 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7 | 20 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 8 | 21 Nov | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| 9 | 22 Nov | 0 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 10 | 23 Nov | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 0 | 2 | 3 | 5 | |
The Iran–Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began on 22 September 1980 with a full-scale invasion of Iran by neighbouring Iraq. The war lasted for almost eight years, and ended in an effective stalemate on 20 August 1988, when Iran accepted Resolution 598 of the United Nations Security Council. Iraq's primary rationale for the invasion was to cripple Iran and prevent Ruhollah Khomeini from exporting the 1979 Iranian Revolution movement to Shia-majority Iraq and internally exploit religious tensions that would threaten the Sunni-dominated Ba'athist leadership. Iraq had also wished to replace Iran as the dominant state in the Persian Gulf, which, prior to the Iranian Revolution, was not seen as an achievable objective by the Iraqi leadership due to pre-revolutionary Iran's colossal economic and military power as well as its close alliances with the United States, a superpower, and Israel, a major player in the Middle East. The war followed a long-running history of bilateral border disputes between the two states, as a result of which Iraq had planned to annex Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province and the eastern bank of the Shatt al-Arab.
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was an Iraqi politician who served as the fifth President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party—which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism—Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the party to power in Iraq.
The Gulf War was a war waged by coalition forces from 35 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait arising from oil pricing and production disputes.
Mosul is a major city in northern Iraq. It is the capital of Nineveh governorate and Iraq's second-largest city. Approximately 400 km (250 mi) north of Baghdad, Mosul lies on the Tigris river. The Mosul metropolitan area has grown from the old city on the western side to encompass substantial areas on both the "Left Bank" and the "Right Bank", as locals call the two riverbanks. Mosul encloses the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh on its east side.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the CIA, under the direct orders of the then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
Iraqi Kurdistan or Southern Kurdistan refers to the Kurdish-populated part of northern Iraq. It is considered one of the four parts of Kurdistan, which also includes parts of southeastern Turkey, northern Syria, and northwestern Iran. Much of the geographical and cultural region of Iraqi Kurdistan is part of the Kurdistan Region (KRI), an autonomous region recognized by the Constitution of Iraq.
The Iraqi Air Force is the aerial warfare service branch of the Iraqi Armed Forces, responsible for the policing of international borders and surveillance of national assets. The IQAF also acts as a support force for the Iraqi Navy and the Iraqi Army, and it allows Iraq to rapidly deploy its developing Army.
The Kurdistan Region is an autonomous region in northern Iraq comprising the four Kurdish-majority governorates of Dohuk, Erbil, Halabja and Sulaymaniyah and bordering Iran, Syria and Turkey. The Kurdistan Region encompasses most of Iraqi Kurdistan but excludes the disputed territories of Northern Iraq, contested between the Kurdistan Regional Government and the central Iraqi government in Baghdad since Kurdish autonomy was realized in 1992 in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The Kurdistan Region Parliament is situated in Erbil, but the constitution of the Kurdistan Region declares the disputed city of Kirkuk to be the capital of the Kurdistan Region. When the Iraqi Army withdrew from most of the disputed areas in mid-2014 because of the ISIL offensive in Northern Iraq, Kurdish Peshmerga entered the areas and held control there until Iraq retook the areas in October 2017.
The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict from 2003 to 2011 that began with the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition which overthrew the authoritarian government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis were killed in the first three to five years of conflict. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011. The U.S. became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition; the insurgency and many dimensions of the armed conflict continue. The invasion occurred as part of the George W. Bush administration's War on Terror following the September 11 attacks despite no connection of the latter to Iraq.
The Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF–I), often referred to as the coalition forces, was a military command during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and much of the ensuing Iraq War, led by the United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain and Poland, responsible for conducting and handling military operations.
Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in Western Asia, bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Kuwait to the southeast, Saudi Arabia to the south, Jordan to the southwest and Syria to the west. The capital and largest city is Baghdad. Iraq is home to diverse ethnic groups including Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Yazidis, Shabakis, Armenians, Sabian-Mandaeans, Circassians, and Kawliya. Around 95-98% of the country's 38 million citizens are Muslims, with small minorities of Christians, Yarsans, Yezidis and Mandaeans also present. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish. Its capital and largest city is Baghdad.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, officially known as the Islamic State (IS) and also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, is a militant group and former unrecognized proto-state that follows a Salafi jihadist doctrine. ISIL was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and gained global prominence in 2014 when it drove Iraqi security forces out of key cities in its Western Iraq offensive, followed by its capture of Mosul and the Sinjar massacre.
Yazidis (also written as Yezidis are an endogamous and mostly Kurmanji-speaking minority, indigenous to the Kurdish regions, which includes parts of Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. The majority of Yazidis remaining in the Middle East today live in the disputed territories of Northern Iraq, primarily in the Nineveh and Dohuk governorates. There is a disagreement on whether Yazidis are a religious sub-group of Kurds or a distinct ethnoreligious group, among scholars and Yazidis themselves. The Yazidi religion is monotheistic and has roots in a western pre-Zoroastrian Iranic faith.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, born Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai, was an Iraqi terrorist and the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) from 2014 until his death in 2019.
The Iraqi insurgency was an insurgency that began in late 2011 after the end of the Iraq War and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, resulting in violent conflict with the central government, as well as low-level sectarian violence among Iraq's religious groups.
The Islamic State of Iraq was a militant Salafist jihadist group that aimed to establish an Islamic state in Sunni, Arab-majority areas of Iraq during the Iraq War and later in Syria during the Syrian Civil War.
The Northern Iraq offensive began on 4 June 2014, when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and allied forces began a major offensive in northern Iraq against Iraqi government forces, following earlier clashes that had begun in December 2013.
The War in Iraq was an armed conflict between Iraq and its allies and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant which began in December 2013 and ended in December 2017. In 2013, the insurgency escalated into a full-scale war with the conquest of Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit and other towns in the major areas of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. At its height, ISIL held 56,000 square kilometers of Iraqi territory, containing 4.5 million citizens. This resulted in the forced resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as well as a massive airstrike campaign by the United States and at least a dozen other countries, participation of American and Canadian troops in ground combat operations, a $3.5 billion U.S.-led program to rearm the Iraqi Security Forces, a U.S.-led training program that provided training to nearly 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, the participation of Iranian troops including armored and air elements, and military and logistical aid provided to Iraq by Russia.
In response to rapid territorial gains made by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) during the first half of 2014, and its universally condemned executions, reported human rights abuses and the fear of further spillovers of the Syrian Civil War, many states began to intervene against it in both the Syrian Civil War and the War in Iraq. Later, there were also minor interventions by some states against ISIL-affiliated groups in Nigeria and Libya.
On 15 June 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama ordered United States forces to be dispatched in response to the Northern Iraq offensive of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). At the invitation of the Iraqi government, American troops went to assess Iraqi forces and the threat posed by ISIL.