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The following is a list of massacres that have occurred in the area of modern Iraq, and does not include collateral damage, especially from raids and airstrikes, which were due to mistaken identity or unfortunately getting caught in the line of fire.
| Date | City | Attack | Deaths | (Alleged) Perpetrator | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 January – 10 February 1258 |  Baghdad | Siege of Baghdad (1258) | 200,000 – 2,000,000 |  Ilkhanate Mongol Empire  Kingdom of Georgia  Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia | estimates range from 200,000 to 2,000,000 civilian deaths | [1] [2] |
| 21 April 1802 |  Karbala | Wahhabi sack of Karbala | 2,000-5,000 |  Emirate of Diriyah | About 12,000 Wahhabi Sunnis under the command of Abdul-Aziz bin Muhammad, the second ruler of the First Saudi State attack and sack Karbala, kill between 2,000 and 5,000 inhabitants and plunder the tomb of Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of Muhammad and son of Ali ibn Abi Talib. |
| Date | City | Attack | Deaths | (Alleged) perpetrator | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 May 1924 |  Kirkuk | Kirkuk Massacre of 1924 | 200 [3] -300 | Assyrian Levies | Assyrian Levies massacre an estimated 200-300 people after a Turkmen shop keeper and Assyrian soldier get into an argument. | [4] [5] |
| 7 August 1933 – 11 August 1933 | Northern Kingdom of Iraq, notably at Simele | Simele massacre | Several hundred (British estimate) [6] [7] [8] 3,000–6,000 (Assyrian estimate) [9] [10] | Royal Iraqi Army (led by Bakr Sidqi, Arab and Kurdish tribes | the Iraqi army massacred 600–3,000 Assyrian Christians | [11] |
| 1935–1936 | Kingdom of Iraq | 1935–1936 Iraqi Shia revolts | 200 | Kingdom of Iraq, Iraqi Shia tribesmen, Ikha Party | Series of Shia tribal uprisings in the mid-Euphrates region against the Sunni dominated authority of the Kingdom of Iraq. In each revolt, the response of the Iraqi government was to use military force to crush the rebellions with little mercy | |
| 1–2 June 1941 | Baghdad | Farhud | ~180 to 1,000+ Jews killed [12] ~300–400 pogromists killed during suppression | Rashid Ali, Yunis al-Sabawi, al-Futuwa youths, and Iraqi mobs | Considered "The Beginning of The End of The Jewish Community of Iraq | [13] |
| 12 July 1946 | Kirkuk | Gavurbağı massacre | 16-20 | Iraqi police | Turkmen protestors were massacred | [14] |
| January 1948 | Baghdad | Al-Wathbah uprising | 300-400 | Iraqi Police | It is estimated that 300 – 400 demonstrators were killed | |
| April 1950 – June 1951 | Baghdad | 1950–1951 Baghdad bombings | 3–4 | Iraqi Zionist agents, Israeli Mossad agents, Iraqi Istiqlal Party agents | Series of bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad | [15] |
| 14 July 1959 |  Kirkuk | Kirkuk massacre of 1959 | 71-79 |  Iraqi Communist Party,Fourth Brigade | Kurdish members of the Iraqi Communist Party target Turkmens leaving an estimated 20 dead. This was followed by Kurdish soldiers from the Fourth Brigade targeting Turkmen residential areas with mortars, causing the destruction of 120 homes. Between 31 and 79 Turkmen were killed with 130 wounded. The Iraqi government referred to the incident as a "massacre". | [16] |
| 27 January 1969 |  Baghdad | 1969 Baghdad hangings | 14 |  Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party | Iraqi authorities hanged 14 Iraqis for allegedly spying for Israel during a public execution in Baghdad; nine were Jewish, three were Muslim and two were Christian | [17] |
| 16 September 1969 | Surya | Surya massacre | 47 | Ba'athist regime | The Iraqi military headed by Lieutenant Abdul Karim al-Jahayshee massacred 47 people in the Assyrian village of Soriya (Ṣawriyā) including the Chaldean priest Ḥannā Yaʻqūb Qāshā and left 22 wounded. | [18] [19] [20] |
| 1975 | Najaf | Najaf purges[ citation needed ] | 100 | Ba'athist regime | Over 100 Shi’ite clerics killed and 1250 arrested. | [ citation needed ] |
| 4-9 February 1977 | Najaf and Karbala | 1977 Shia uprising in Iraq | unknown | Ba'athist regime | Despite brutally enforced ban on public religiousness, thousands of people defy it and head to Karbala during the Arba'een Pilgrimage. Hundreds were killed and thousands arrested by the regime. | |
| Date | City | Attack | Deaths | (Alleged) Perpetrator | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 July 1979 | Khuld hall | 1979 Ba'ath Party Purge | 21 | Ba'athist regime organized by Saddam Hussein | Internal purge of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party after the new president Saddam Hussein assumed power and alleged a Syrian back coup d'etat. 68 people were arrested, of which 21 were executed by firing squad. | |
| 1968–2003 | Ba'athist Iraq | Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq | 2,500 [21] to 12,500 [21] [22] | Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party | Between 1968 and 2003, the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party of the Iraqi Republic perpetrated multiple campaigns of demographic engineering against the country's non-Arabs. While Arabs constitute the majority of Iraq's population as a whole, they are not the majority in parts of northern Iraq, and a minority in Iraqi Kurdistan. In an attempt to Arabize the north, the Iraqi government pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, killing and forcefully displacing a large number of Iraqi minorities—predominantly Kurds, but also Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyrians, Shabaks, Mandaeans, and Armenians, among others—and subsequently allotting the cleared land to Arab settlers | |
| 1980s | Ba'athist Iraq | Persecution of Shi'a muslims and political dissidents under Saddam Hussein | 50,000-70,000 Shi'a and 50,000 dissidents disappeared. Full death toll unknown. | Saddam Hussein | 50,000 to 70,000 Shi'a, and 50,000 opposition activists, communists, Kurds and other minorities disappeared into Iraqi prisons in the 1980s | [23] |
| 1970-2003 | Nationwide | Persecution of Feyli Kurds under Saddam Hussein | 15,000-25,000 disappeared | Saddam Hussein | May 7, 1980, Persecution of Feyli Kurds under Saddam Hussein, Nationwide; 15,000–25,000 Feyli Kurds were targeted in a genocide via exportation and forced relocations. | [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] |
| 8 July 1982 | Dujail | Dujail massacre | 148 | Iraqi Ba'ath Party | Judicial reprisal targeting Shia Muslims following a failed assassination attempt on Saddam Hussein by the Islamic Dawa Party. Saddam would eventually be executed for crimes against humanity in relation to the massacre. | |
| 10 May 1983 | Specific location unknown | Massacre of the Hakim family | Hundreds | Saddam Hussein | Saddam ordered further arrest of all Hakim family. Hundreds were killed and buried in mass graves. | |
| July-August, 1983 | Kurdistan Region | Repression of Barzani Kurds under Ba'ath regime | 8000 | Saddam Hussein | In July and August 1983, on the orders of President Saddam Hussein, over 8,000 men and boys of the Barzani Kurds, some as young as 13, were killed by the Ba'athist Iraq. | [30] [31] [32] [33] |
| 16 March 1984 | Abu Ghraib prison | Abu Ghraib purge | 4000 | Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region | A mass grave was discovered at the Abu Ghraib prison, containing the bodies of thousands following a purge. Estimated 4000 dead. | [34] |
| 23 February - 6 September 1988 | Kurdistan Region | Anfal Campaign | 50,000-182,000 | Saddam Hussein, Ali Hassan al-Majid, Hussein Rashid | Counter insurgency operation during the Iran Iraq War targeting primarily Kurds, as well as other minority groups that had allegedly collaborated with the Iranian Army. During the campaign, the Iraqi government made extensive use of chemical weapons which resulted in thousands of causalities. Use of enforced disappearances, mass deportation and detention camps were also present. The operation is recognized as a genocide by Human Rights Watch. | [35] [36] [37] |
| 16 March 1988 | Halabja, Kurdistan Region | Halabja massacre | 3,200–5,000 [38] | Iraqi Republic | Iraqi government used chemical weapons on Kurdish town, At least 3,200–5,000 people died as an immediate result of the chemical attack and it is estimated that a further 7,000-10,000 people were injured or suffered long-term illness. [38] | [39] |
Nineveh or Ninawa Governorate is a governorate in northern Iraq. It has an area of 37,323 km2 (14,410 sq mi) and an estimated population of 2,453,000 people as of 2003. Its largest city and provincial capital is Mosul, which lies across the Tigris river from the ruins of ancient Nineveh. Before 1976, it was called Mosul Province and included the present-day Dohuk Governorate. The second largest city is Tal Afar, which has an almost exclusively Turkmen population.
Human rights in post-invasion Iraq have been the subject of concerns and controversies since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Concerns have been expressed about conduct by insurgents, the U.S.-led coalition forces and the Iraqi government. The U.S. is investigating several allegations of violations of international and internal standards of conduct in isolated incidents by its own forces and contractors. The UK is also conducting investigations of alleged human rights abuses by its forces. War crime tribunals and criminal prosecution of the numerous crimes by insurgents are likely years away. In late February 2009, the U.S. State Department released a report on the human rights situation in Iraq, looking back on the prior year (2008).
The Peshmerga comprise the internal security forces of Kurdistan Region, a semi-autonomous federal region in the Republic of Iraq. According to the Constitution of Iraq, regional governments are responsible for "the establishment and organization of the internal security forces for the region such as police, security forces, and guards of the region". Other agencies include Asayish, Parastin û Zanyarî, and Zêrevanî. The Peshmerga's history dates back to the 18th century, when they began as a strictly tribal pseudo-military border guard under the Ottoman Turks and the Safavid Iranians. By the 19th century, they had evolved into a disciplined and well-trained guerrilla force.
Iraqi Assyrians are an ethnic and linguistic minority group, indigenous to Upper Mesopotamia. They are defined as Assyrians residing in the country of Iraq, or members of the Assyrian diaspora who are of Iraqi-Assyrian heritage. They share a common history and ethnic identity, rooted in shared linguistic, cultural and religious traditions, with Assyrians in Iran, Turkey and Syria, as well as with the Assyrian diaspora elsewhere. A significant number have emigrated to the United States, notably to the Detroit and Chicago; a sizeable community is also found in Sydney, Australia.
Sinjar is a town in the Sinjar District of the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq. It is located about five kilometers south of the Sinjar Mountains. Its population in 2013 was estimated at 88,023, and is predominantly Yazidi.
Minorities in Iraq have been incredibly influential to the history of the country, and consist of various ethnic and religious groups. The largest minority group in Iraq is the Kurds, with Turkmen following shortly after. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Assyrians constituted a sizeable population of 1.5 million, and belonged to various different churches such as the Assyrian Church of the East, Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Syriac Orthodox/Catholic Churches. Other minority groups in Iraq include Armenians, Mandaeans, Baha'i, and Marsh Arabs, among others.
The vast majority of Christians in Iraq are indigenous Assyrians who descend from ancient Assyria, and are considered to be one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. They primarily adhere to the Syriac Christian tradition and rites and speak Northeastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, although Turoyo is also present on a smaller scale. Some are also known by the name of their religious denomination as well as their ethnic identity, such as Chaldo-Assyrians, Chaldean Catholics or Syriacs. Non-Assyrian Iraqi Christians include Arab Christians and Armenians, and a very small minority of Kurdish, Shabaks and Iraqi Turkmen Christians. Regardless of religious affiliation Assyrians Christians in Iraq and surrounding countries are one genetically homogeneous people and are of different origins than other groups in the country, with a distinct history of their own harking back to ancient Assyria and Mesopotamia.
William Warda is an Iraqi Assyrian journalist and human rights campaigner. He is a former leading member of Iraq's Assyrian Democratic Movement and former general manager of Ashur TV before co-founding the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization with his wife, Pascal Esho Warda, who was a former Minister of Immigration and Refugees in the Iraqi Interim Government.
The disputed territories of northern Iraq are regions defined by article 140 of the Constitution of Iraq as being Arabised during Baath Party rule in Iraq. Most of these regions are inhabited by non-Arabs, including Kurds, Assyrians, Yazidis, Turkmens/Turkomans, and Shabaks.
The persecution of Christians by the Islamic State involves the systematic mass murder of Christian minorities, within the regions of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique and Nigeria controlled by the Islamic extremist group Islamic State. Persecution of Christian minorities climaxed following the Syrian civil war and later by its spillover but has since intensified further. Christians have been subjected to massacres, forced conversions, rape, sexual slavery, and the systematic destruction of their historical sites, churches and other places of worship.
The War in Iraq (2013–2017) was an armed conflict between Iraq and its allies and the Islamic State. Following December 2013, the insurgency escalated into full-scale guerrilla warfare following clashes in the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah in parts of western Iraq, and culminated in the Islamic State offensive into Iraq in June 2014, which lead to the capture of the cities of Mosul, Tikrit and other cities in western and northern Iraq by the Islamic State. Between 4–9 June 2014, the city of Mosul was attacked and later fell; following this, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called for a national state of emergency on 10 June. However, despite the security crisis, Iraq's parliament did not allow Maliki to declare a state of emergency; many legislators boycotted the session because they opposed expanding the prime minister's powers. Ali Ghaidan, a former military commander in Mosul, accused al-Maliki of being the one who issued the order to withdraw from the city of Mosul. At its height, ISIL held 56,000 square kilometers of Iraqi territory, containing 4.5 million citizens.
Between 1 and 15 August 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) expanded territory in northern Iraq under their control. In the region north and west from Mosul, the Islamic State conquered Zumar, Sinjar, Wana, Mosul Dam, Qaraqosh, Tel Keppe, Batnaya and Kocho, and in the region south and east of Mosul the towns Bakhdida, Karamlish, Bartella and Makhmour
The following lists events that happened during 2014 in Iraq.
This is a timeline of events during the War in Iraq in 2015.
The Timeline of the War in Iraq covers the War in Iraq, a war which erupted that lasted in Iraq from 2013 to 2017, during the first year of armed conflict.
Between 1968 and 2003, the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party of the Iraqi Republic perpetrated multiple campaigns of demographic engineering against the country's non-Arabs. While Arabs constitute the majority of Iraq's population as a whole, they are not the majority in all parts of northern Iraq. In an attempt to Arabize the north, the Iraqi government pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, killing and forcefully displacing a large number of Iraqi minorities—predominantly Kurds, but also Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyrians, Shabaks and Armenians, among others—and subsequently allotting the cleared land to Arab settlers. In 1978 and 1979 alone, 600 Kurdish villages were burned down and around 200,000 Kurds were deported to other parts of Iraq.
The November Sinjar offensive was a combination of operations of Kurdish Peshmerga, PKK, and Yezidi Kurd militias in November 2015, to recapture the city of Sinjar from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. It resulted in a decisive victory for the Kurdish forces, who expelled the ISIL militants from Sinjar and regained control of Highway 47, which until then had served as the major supply route between the ISIL strongholds of Raqqa and Mosul.
The persecution of the Feyli Kurds was a systematic persecution of Feylis by Saddam Hussein between 1970 and 2003. The persecution campaigns led to the expulsion, flight and effective exile of the Feyli Kurds from their ancestral lands in Iraq. The persecution began when a large number of Feyli Kurds were exposed to a big campaign by the regime that began by the dissolved RCCR issuance for 666 decision, which deprived Feyli Kurds of Iraqi nationality and considered them as Iranians. The systematic executions started in Baghdad and Khanaqin in 1979 and later spread to other Iraqi and Kurdish areas.
The persecution of Yazidis has been ongoing since at least the 12th century. Yazidis are an endogamous and mostly Kurmanji-speaking minority, indigenous to Kurdistan. The Yazidi religion is regarded as "devil-worship" by some Muslims and Islamists. Yazidis have been persecuted by the surrounding Muslims since the medieval ages, most notably by Safavids, Ottomans, neighbouring Muslim Arab and Kurdish tribes and principalities. After the 2014 Sinjar massacre of thousands of Yazidis by ISIL, which started the ethnic, cultural, and religious genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq, Yazidis still face discrimination from the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government.
Anti-Assyrian sentiment, also known as anti-Assyrianism and Assyriophobia, is a diverse spectrum of negative feelings, dislikes, fears, aversion, racism, derision and/or prejudice towards Assyrians, Assyria, and Assyrian culture.
The total number of Assyrian victims of these events was estimated by British officials at about 600, but Assyrian sources put it at several thousand.
