The Iran–Iraq War, also known as the First Gulf War, was an armed conflict between Iran and Iraq that lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. Active hostilities began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran and lasted for nearly eight years, until the acceptance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 598 by both sides. Iraq's primary rationale for the attack against Iran cited the need to prevent Ruhollah Khomeini—who had spearheaded the Iranian revolution in 1979—from exporting the new Iranian ideology to Iraq. There were also fears among the Iraqi leadership of Saddam Hussein that Iran, a theocratic state with a population predominantly composed of Shia Muslims, would exploit sectarian tensions in Iraq by rallying Iraq's Shia majority against the Baʽathist government, which was officially secular and dominated by Sunni Muslims. Iraq also wished to replace Iran as the power player in the Persian Gulf, which was not seen as an achievable objective prior to the Islamic Revolution because of Pahlavi Iran's economic and military superiority as well as its close relationships with the United States and Israel.
Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 until his overthrow in 2003. He previously served as the vice president of Iraq from 1968 to 1979 and also served as prime minister from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and later its Iraqi regional branch. Ideologically, he espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, while the policies and political ideas he championed are collectively known as Saddamism.
The Shatt al-Arab is a river about 200 kilometres (120 mi) in length that is formed at the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the town of al-Qurnah in the Basra Governorate of southern Iraq. The southern end of the river constitutes the Iran–Iraq border down to its mouth, where it discharges into the Persian Gulf. The Shatt al-Arab varies in width from about 232 metres (761 ft) at Basra to 800 metres (2,600 ft) at its mouth. It is thought that the waterway formed relatively recently in geological time, with the Tigris and Euphrates originally emptying into the Persian Gulf via a channel further to the west. Kuwait's Bubiyan Island is part of the Shatt al-Arab delta.
The 1975 Algiers Agreement, also known as the Algiers Accord and the Algiers Declaration, was signed between Iran and Iraq to settle any outstanding territorial disputes along the Iran–Iraq border. Mediated by Algeria, it served as the basis for additional bilateral treaties signed on 13 June 1975 and 26 December 1975. The territorial disputes in question concerned Iraq's Shatt al-Arab and Iran's Khuzestan Province, and Iraq had wished to negotiate to end Iran's support for the then-ongoing Iraqi Kurdish rebellion after suffering a military defeat in the 1974–1975 Shatt al-Arab conflict. On 17 September 1980, shortly after the Iranian Revolution, the Iraqi government abrogated the treaty in light of another series of cross-border clashes between the two countries. On 22 September 1980, the treaty was completely voided with the Iraqi invasion of Iran, which triggered the eight-year-long Iran–Iraq War.
The Iran–Iraq border runs for 1,599 km (994 mi) from the tripoint with Turkey in the north down to the Shatt al-Arab waterway and out to the Persian Gulf in the south. Although the boundary was first determined in 1639, certain disputes continue, particularly surrounding navigation on the Shatt al-Arab.
The State of Israel and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq maintain a close informal relationship, but do not have formal diplomatic missions in each other's territory. Their ties are rooted in Israel's historically strong support for the Kurdish people and their long-running desire for self-determination and national independence in Kurdistan. In 1992, shortly after Iraq lost the Gulf War, the Kurdistan Region was recognized as an autonomous entity and began governing a portion of Iraqi Kurdistan, marking a significant development in the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict. The Iraqi government and the Kurdish government have differing policies with regard to the entry of Israeli citizens into their territory: Kurdish authorities accept Israeli passports at Erbil and Sulaymaniyah, and Israelis are entitled to regular freedom of movement throughout the Kurdistan Region; but Iraqi authorities do not accept Israeli passports, and Israelis are forbidden from entering Iraq proper. Residents of the Kurdistan Region are bound by the Iraqi passport, which prohibits all travel to Israel. This is because Iraq, which has been a party to the Arab–Israeli conflict since Israel's founding in 1948, does not recognize Israeli sovereignty.
Diplomatic relations between Iraq and the United States began when the U.S. first recognized Iraq on January 9, 1930, with the signing of the Anglo-American-Iraqi Convention in London by Charles G. Dawes, U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The historiography of Iraq—United States relations prior to the 1980s is considered relatively underdeveloped, with the first in-depth academic studies being published in the 2010s. Today, the United States and Iraq both consider themselves as strategic partners, given the American political and military involvement after the invasion of Iraq and their mutual, deep-rooted relationship that followed. The United States provides the Iraqi security forces hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid and training annually as well as uses its military bases.
Iran–Iraq relations are the diplomatic and foreign relations between the two sovereign states of Iran and Iraq.
After World War I, Iraq passed from the failing Ottoman Empire to British control. Kingdom of Iraq was established under the British Mandate in 1932. In the 14 July Revolution of 1958, the king was deposed and the Republic of Iraq was declared. In 1963, the Ba'ath Party staged a coup d'état and was in turn toppled by another coup in the same year, but managed to retake power in 1968. Saddam Hussein took power in 1979 and ruled Iraq for the remainder of the century, during the Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, the Invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War of 1990 to 1991 and the UN sanction during the 1990s. Saddam was removed from power in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The Treaties of Erzurum were two treaties that were ratified in 1823 and 1847 which settled boundary disputes between the Ottoman Empire and Persia.
Iraqi nationalism is a form of nationalism that asserts the belief that Iraqis form a nation and promotes the cultural unity of Iraqis of different ethnoreligious groups such as Mesopotamian Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Yazidis, Mandeans, Shabaks and Yarsans.
Ali Askari (1936–1978) was a Kurdish politician, military leader, and revolutionary. He was a prominent leader in Iraqi Kurdistan and his political party was the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).
The Second Iraqi–Kurdish War was the second chapter of the Barzani rebellion, initiated by the collapse of the Kurdish autonomy talks and the consequent Iraqi offensive against rebel KDP troops of Mustafa Barzani during 1974–1975. The war came in the aftermath of the First Iraqi–Kurdish War (1961–1970), as the 1970 peace plan for Kurdish autonomy had failed to be implemented by 1974. Unlike the previous guerrilla campaign in 1961–1970, waged by Barzani, the 1974 war was a Kurdish attempt at symmetric warfare against the Iraqi Army, which eventually led to the quick collapse of the Kurds, who were lacking advanced and heavy weaponry. The war ended with the exile of the Iraqi KDP party and between 7,000–20,000 deaths from both sides combined.
The Iraqi–Kurdish conflict consists of a series of wars, rebellions and disputes between the Kurds and the central authority of Iraq starting in the 20th century shortly after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Some put the marking point of the conflict beginning to the attempt by Mahmud Barzanji to establish an independent Kingdom of Kurdistan, while others relate to the conflict as only the post-1961 insurrection by the Barzanis.
The Peshmerga have historically been Kurdish guerrilla forces combating the ruling powers in the region of what is now Iraqi Kurdistan. The term "Peshmerga" refers to those who face death, and the forces have long been an essential element in the Kurdish fight for autonomy and recognition.
The following lists events that happened during 1959 in Iraq.
The following lists events that happened during 1975 in Iraq.
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 Iraqi invasion of Iran began on 22 September 1980, sparking the Iran–Iraq War, and lasted until 5 December 1980. Ba'athist Iraq believed that Iran would not respond effectively due to internal socio-political turmoil caused by the country's Islamic Revolution one year earlier. However, Iraqi troops faced fierce Iranian resistance, which stalled their advance into western Iran. In two months, the invasion came to a halt after Iraq occupied more than 25,900 square kilometres (10,000 sq mi) of Iranian territory.
The 1974–1975 Shatt al-Arab conflict consisted of armed cross-border clashes between Iran and Iraq. It was a major escalation of the Shatt al-Arab dispute, which had begun in 1936 due to opposing territorial claims by both countries over the Shatt al-Arab, a transboundary river that runs partly along the Iran–Iraq border. The conflict took place between April 1974 and March 1975, and resulted in over 1,000 total casualties for both sides combined, though the Iranians eventually came to hold a strategic advantage over the Iraqis. Open hostilities formally came to an end with the 1975 Algiers Agreement, in which Iraq ceded around half of the border area containing the waterway in exchange for Iran's cessation of support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels.
