Dissolved | 2003 Iraq War |
---|---|
Location | Tikrit, Iraq. |
The Tikrit Museum is a museum located in Tikrit, Iraq. It was damaged during 2003 Iraq War. [1] [2]
Tikrit is a city in Iraq, located 140 kilometres (87 mi) northwest of Baghdad and 220 kilometres (140 mi) southeast of Mosul on the Tigris River. It is the administrative center of the Saladin Governorate. As of 2012, it had a population of approximately 160,000.
The Saladin or Salah Al-Din Governorate is one of Iraq's 19 governorates, north of Baghdad. It has an area of 24,363 square kilometres (9,407 sq mi), with an estimated population of 1,042,200 people in 2003. It is made up of 8 districts, with the capital being Tikrit. Before 1976 the province was part of Baghdad Governorate.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a United States-led invasion of the Republic of Iraq and the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion phase began on 19 March 2003 (air) and 20 March 2003 (ground) and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations, in which a combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded Iraq. Twenty-two days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by Coalition forces on 9 April 2003 after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. This early stage of the war formally ended on 1 May 2003 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.
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was an Iraqi politician and army field marshal. He served as Vice Chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council until the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and was regarded as the closest advisor and deputy under President Saddam Hussein. He led the Iraqi insurgent group Naqshbandi Army.
The Peace Companies are an Iraqi armed group linked to Iraq's Shia community. They are a 2014 revival of the Mahdi Army that was created by the Iraqi Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in June 2003 and disbanded in 2008.
Task Force Tripoli (TFT) was a United States Marine Corps air-ground task force formed after the fall of Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This ad-hoc formation was tasked with continuing the attack north to secure the city of Tikrit. It was commanded by Brigadier General John F. Kelly, then Assistant Division Commander of the 1st Marine Division. Within 12 hours of tasking, the Marines were able to put together a convoy of 600 vehicles and 4,000 troops for the mission. The unit was composited on April 12, 2003, in a staging area east of Baghdad and had secured Tikrit by April 15. It is the first time that the Marine Corps ever employed an entire LAV regiment and marked the farthest inland that Marine Forces had ever advanced.
Majid al Tamimi Airbase, officially known as the Tikrit Air Academy and formerly as Al Sahra Airfield is an air installation near Tikrit in northern Iraq. The installation is approximately 170 kilometers north of Baghdad and 11 kilometers west of the Tigris River. Prior to 2003, Al Sahra Airfield was the main base of the Iraqi Air Force Air Academy. The Marines from Task Force Tripoli captured the base from the Iraqi Army during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and turned it over the United States Army who used it as the headquarters of the United States Division–North. The airfield is served by two main runways measuring 9,600 feet (2,900 m) long with a shorter runway measuring 7,200-foot (2,200 m). The Americans named the airfield after Captain Michael Scott Speicher, a United States Navy pilot who was killed in action in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.
Tikrit South Air Base, formerly known as FOB Packhorse and FOB Remagen, is a former Iraqi Air Force base in Salah ad Din Governorate of Iraq. It was captured by U.S.-led Coalition forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.
The 2011 Tikrit assault was an attack by the Islamic State of Iraq that took place in the city of Tikrit, Iraq, on 29 March 2011, while the war was still ongoing. Reuters news agency included the attack in its list of deadliest attacks in 2011. The Al-Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility for killing 65 people and wounding over 100. At the time the United States Armed Forces were withdrawing. Tikrit was Saddam Hussein's birthplace.
The First Battle of Tikrit was a battle for the Iraqi city of Tikrit following the city's capture by the Islamic State and Ba'athist Loyalists during the 2014 Northern Iraq offensive. The battle took place between 26 and 30 June 2014.
The War in Iraq was an armed conflict between Iraq and its allies and the Islamic State which began in 2013 and ended in December 2017. 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 Nuri 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.
The Camp Speicher massacre occurred on 12 June 2014, when the Islamic State killed between 1,095 to 1,700 Iraqi cadets in an attack on Camp Speicher in Tikrit, Iraq. At the time of the massacre, there were between 5,000 and 100,000 unarmed cadets in the camp, and ISIL fighters selected the Shias and Christians for execution. It is the second deadliest non-state act of terrorism in history, only surpassed by the September 11 attacks.
The Iranian intervention in Iraq has its roots in the post-2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and allies when the infrastructure of the Iraqi armed forces, as well as intelligence, were disbanded in a process called "de-Ba'athification" which allowed militias with close ties to Tehran to join the newly reconstituted army.
Human rights in the territory controlled by the Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS) are considered to be in one of the worst states, if not the worst state in modern history and it has been harshly criticized by many political and religious organisations, as well as by many individuals. The Islamic State's policies included acts of genocide, torture and slavery. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) has stated that the Islamic State "seeks to subjugate civilians under its control and dominate every aspect of their lives through terror, indoctrination, and the provision of services to those who obey". Many Islamic State actions of extreme criminality, terror, recruitment and other activities has been documented in the Middle East.
The Dhuluiya offensive was launched on 28 December 2014 by Iraqi forces backed by Sunni tribesmen and Shia militiamen on the strategic town of Dhuluiya, which had been held by ISIL for months. On 30 December, the area was recaptured and the ISIL siege on the Sunni al-Juburi tribe was broken.
Deliberate destruction and theft of cultural heritage has been conducted by the Islamic State since 2014 in Iraq, Syria, and to a lesser extent in Libya. The destruction targets various places of worship under ISIL control and ancient historical artifacts. In Iraq, between the fall of Mosul in June 2014 and February 2015, IS had plundered and destroyed at least 28 historical religious buildings. Valuable items from some buildings were looted in order to smuggle and sell them to foreigners to finance the running of the Islamic State.
The Second Battle of Tikrit was a battle in which Iraqi Security Forces recaptured the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Iraqi forces consisted of the Iraqi Army and the Popular Mobilization Forces, receiving assistance from Iran's Quds Force officers on the ground, and air support from the American, British, and French air forces.
The Salahuddin Campaign was a military conflict in the Saladin Governorate, located in north-central Iraq, involving various factions fighting against a single common enemy, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The province exited Iraqi government control during ISIL's Northern Iraq offensive when large swathes of the north of the country were captured by the militant group with the Iraqi national army quickly disintegrating in the path of its advance. In light of the sweeping gains of the militants, Nouri Al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq at that time, attempted to declare a state of emergency though the Iraqi Parliament blocked his efforts to do so.
The Popular Mobilization Forces, also known as the People's Mobilization Committee (PMC) and the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), is an Iraqi state-sponsored umbrella organization composed of approximately 67 different armed factions, with around 128,000 fighters that are mostly Shia Muslim groups, but also include Sunni Muslim, Christian, and Yazidi groups. However, an investigation led by former Prime Minister of Iraq Haider al-Abadi revealed that approximately 60,000 are real soldiers, while the other 70,000 are "ghost soldiers". The Popular Mobilization Units as a group was formed in 2014 and have fought in nearly every major battle against ISIL. It has been called the new Iraqi Republican Guard after it was fully reorganized in early 2018 by its then–Commander in Chief Haider al-Abadi, Prime Minister of Iraq from 2014 to 2018, who issued "regulations to adapt the situation of the Popular Mobilization fighters".