A 2026 analysis of Iraq's war history
Iraq’s war history spans decades of conflict, including the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, sectarian violence, the rise of ISIS, and ongoing regional instability.
Throughout 2025, violence in Iraq remained limited, chiefly government operations against the Islamic State (IS) and Turkish strikes on the PKK in the north. UCDP recorded 137 battle-related deaths, including 7 civilians.
The World Map of Conflict uses two complementary datasets from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to visualise conflict per country.
The colour coding of the overview base map is derived from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (GED), which contains fully verified conflict data aggregated at the country level. UCDP publishes the GED annually (typically May–June of the following year) to allow careful validation of every recorded event.
The map on this country page draws from the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset (CED), which includes the most recent reported events and provides a near-real-time overview of conflict developments. Because these events are still under verification, the data should be considered preliminary.
Historical Lenses
To understand Iraq’s conflict history, it is first important to understand what kind of country it is. Historians often explain the same country in different ways depending on what they believe are the main forces driving history. Each historical lens below offers a different, evidence-based interpretation of the country’s development.
The interpretation most widely accepted by historians, based on mainstream historical research and university scholarship. It reflects broad areas of agreement while acknowledging where historians disagree.
Iraq lies in the heart of the Middle East, where two great rivers — the Tigris and the Euphrates — flow down from the mountains of Turkey across a hot, flat plain to the Persian Gulf, a landscape so central to the birth of settled civilisation that the ancient Greeks named it Mesopotamia, “the land between the rivers.” Iraq’s roughly 45 million people divide broadly into three communities: Arab Sunni Muslims concentrated in the centre and west, Arab Shia Muslims forming a majority in the south and in Baghdad, and Kurds, a non-Arab people practising mostly Sunni Islam, concentrated in the mountainous north. The mainstream account holds that these three communities were never fused into a single people before 1921, when Britain assembled the country out of three former Ottoman provinces — Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra — and installed a king to rule over them. Everything that follows, in this reading, is the record of successive rulers — monarchs, generals, a totalitarian party, and finally a fragile democracy — attempting to govern a state whose population had not chosen, and did not always accept, its own boundaries.
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (2000); Phebe Marr & Ibrahim al-Marashi, The Modern History of Iraq (4th ed., 2017).
Five thresholds, in the standard account, remade Iraq’s structure rather than merely its cast of rulers. The 1920–21 creation of the Kingdom of Iraq under British tutelage, with Faisal I installed as king, first fused the three Ottoman provinces into one state and set a template of a Sunni Arab elite governing a Shia Arab majority and a restive Kurdish north. The 1958 revolution, in which army officers overthrew and killed the king, ended thirty-seven years of monarchy and opened three volatile decades of coups. The Ba’ath Party’s) seizure of power in 1968 and Saddam Hussein’s consolidation of personal rule by 1979 built one of the region’s most centralised police states, resting on the security services and a personality cult. The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), then the 1991 Gulf War and the sanctions that followed, bankrupted the state and devastated ordinary life even as Saddam kept his grip on power. The 2003 US-led invasion toppled him outright, and the sectarian civil war and the rise and defeat of the Islamic State (2014–17) that followed exposed how little national glue had ever bound the three communities together.
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (2000); Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (1978); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq (2007), on the mandate period.
Mainstream historians read Iraq’s formation as an unusually stark case of state before nation. Unlike countries where a shared language, faith, or memory produced a demand for statehood, Iraq’s borders were drawn largely by British and French officials after the First World War, stitching together three Ottoman provinces with three different majority populations and no common history of self-rule. A genuinely shared Iraqi identity, on this account, was built afterward — through school curricula, military conscription, a flag and anthem, and decades of coercion — rather than inherited from the past. The 1920 revolt against British rule is often cited as the first stirring of common Iraqi feeling, uniting Sunni and Shia tribes and townspeople in shared resistance, but the unity proved short-lived once the state had to be governed day to day. On this account, Iraq is less a nation that acquired a state than a state still, a century later, working to produce a nation, and the persistent salience of sect and ethnicity in Iraqi politics is read as evidence the project remains incomplete.
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (2000); Phebe Marr & Ibrahim al-Marashi, The Modern History of Iraq (4th ed., 2017).
The long-term force mainstream historians identify is the repeated, and repeatedly frustrated, effort to govern a state assembled from three distinct communities through a strong central authority. From the monarchy’s reliance on a narrow Sunni Arab officer class, through the Ba’ath Party’s brutal centralisation, to the post-2003 attempt to replace dictatorship with a power-sharing democracy, Iraq’s rulers have consistently reached for the same solution to the same underlying problem: how to hold together a country whose population never asked to be one. Each regime imposed unity by force or patronage rather than winning it by consent, and each collapse — 1958, 2003 — reopened the same unresolved question of who should rule and on what basis. What best explains Iraq’s trajectory, on this reading, is this unbroken cycle of centralising rule attempting, and failing, to manufacture durable unity in a state built by outsiders, a cycle that has outlasted monarchy, dictatorship, and occupation alike and still frames the politics of the present.
Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (2000); Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (1978).
Alternative interpretations developed by respected historians that challenge or expand the mainstream view. These perspectives highlight debates within historical scholarship rather than presenting a single accepted explanation.
A revisionist reading resists the popular image of Iraq as simply an “artificial state” — an arbitrary line drawn across the desert by Britain and France with no relation to the people living inside it. The historian Sara Pursley has argued that this “legend of the artificial state” is itself a distortion: Iraq’s borders tracked real administrative and economic continuities from the late Ottoman period, and the idea that the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement (the secret Anglo-French plan for dividing the Ottoman Middle East) simply invented Iraq from nothing gives colonial officials too much credit for shaping identities that were already forming on the ground. On this account, the deeper problem was not the borders themselves but the paternalistic development policies Britain and later Iraqi governments imposed in the name of modernising a supposedly backward population — policies that reshaped family life, land tenure, and even ideas of time around a promised future that never fully arrived. This is a corrective rather than a wholesale rejection: it does not deny that Iraq’s borders were drawn by outside powers, only that “arbitrary colonial invention” explains too little, and that mainstream accounts have been too quick to treat the state’s fragility as proof its borders were meaningless from the start.
Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq (2019).
The revisionist backbone keeps the same run of turning points the mainstream uses — the 1920–21 founding, the 1958 revolution, the Ba’ath consolidation, the wars and sanctions, the 2003 invasion — but rereads the deeper thread connecting them as continuity of coercive state practice rather than a series of unrelated ruptures. Toby Dodge’s influential study argues that the British Mandate authorities, ruling through a mix of aerial policing, a loyal but narrow elite, and administrative shortcuts, built patterns of exclusionary, force-backed governance that Iraqi rulers after independence inherited and intensified rather than replaced. On this reading, Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian state was not an aberration but an extreme expression of a template Britain had already established: govern through a narrow base, suppress dissent decisively, and treat inclusive nation-building as secondary to control. The 2003 American occupation, Dodge argues, repeated several of the same mistakes — governing through an unrepresentative elite and underestimating the difficulty of building durable institutions from scratch. Because this reinterprets accepted events rather than inventing new ones, it counts as serious scholarship — though mainstream historians dispute how much real continuity links the mandate’s limited colonial administration to Saddam’s far more totalising dictatorship.
Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (2003).
Here the revisionist argument directly challenges the “state before nation” consensus by disputing how sharply the two can be separated in Iraq’s case. Sara Pursley’s research into Iraq’s early nationalist currents suggests that a sense of shared Iraqi belonging, at least among the urban and tribal elites of the former Ottoman provinces, existed earlier and ran deeper than the “state manufactured a nation from nothing” narrative allows: the widespread 1920 revolt against British rule, uniting Sunni and Shia religious leaders and tribes across the three provinces, is read here not as a fleeting accident but as evidence of a real, if still-forming, national sentiment that predated the state’s final borders. Fanar Haddad’s research adds a second correction: sectarian identity in Iraq has never been a single fixed thing working against national feeling, but has instead coexisted with Iraqi patriotism, rising and falling with specific political crises — the 1991 uprisings, the 2003 occupation — rather than remaining constant across the century. Together these correct the tidiest version of the mainstream story, though critics note that elite and urban nationalism in 1920 was far from a uniform sentiment reaching the whole population.
Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures (2019); Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (2011).
The force this school foregrounds is not the “artificial state” itself but the recurring, self-reinforcing pattern of coercive governance that outside powers first installed and Iraqi rulers then perfected. In this reading — building chiefly on Dodge’s account of state formation — the deepest driver of Iraq’s history is not a fixed sectarian antagonism or the arbitrariness of colonial borders, but a governing logic, inherited from the Mandate, in which rulers secure a narrow base through force and patronage rather than building broad legitimacy. Saddam’s dictatorship, the sectarian quotas of the post-2003 order, and the persistence of armed factions operating alongside a nominally sovereign state are read as successive variations on this template rather than as separate crises. This departs deliberately from the mainstream’s more structural emphasis on ethnic and sectarian composition as the primary obstacle to unity. Its strength is that it explains why formal changes of regime — monarchy to republic, dictatorship to elected government — have repeatedly failed to produce a state that governs through consent; its contested point is how much weight to give inherited colonial practice against the independent choices of Iraq’s own rulers.
Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq (2003); Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures (2019).
Explains history through religion, culture, identity, political traditions, ideology and the stories societies tell about themselves. This lens asks how beliefs and shared identities have shaped historical development.
Seen through communal identity and religion, Iraq is best understood as a mosaic of communities whose competing collective memories, rather than any single shared story, define political life. The Shia Arab majority looks to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala — burial places of Imams Ali and Hussein, central figures of Shia Islam — as the spiritual heart of their faith and often as a source of authority independent of the state. Najaf’s marja’iyya (the senior clerical leadership whose rulings guide millions of Shia Muslims worldwide) commands a loyalty that has repeatedly rivalled Baghdad’s own. The Sunni Arab minority, concentrated in Baghdad and the provinces to the west and north, supplied most of the country’s rulers from the monarchy through Saddam Hussein and remembers the century differently, often with more attachment to Iraqi and Arab nationalist symbols than to sectarian ones. The Kurds, a non-Arab people with their own language and a long-frustrated aspiration to self-rule, remember British and Iraqi central rule chiefly through repression, including the Ba’athist state’s Anfal campaign of the 1980s. Iraq’s history, on this account, is the story of how these three collective memories have coexisted, clashed, and periodically been suppressed by a state claiming to represent all of them equally.
Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (1994; 2nd ed. 2003); Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq, 1968-89 (1991).
Seen through communal identity, the turning points of Iraqi history are moments that reordered the relationship between the state and its component communities. The installation of a Sunni Arab-led monarchy in 1921, backed by British power, fixed a pattern in which a minority community dominated the machinery of the new state — a pattern the 1958 revolution changed in personnel but not in its basic sectarian arithmetic. The Ba’ath Party’s rise from 1968 and Saddam Hussein’s consolidation by 1979 then built an ideology of secular Arab nationalism and tribal patronage that formally suppressed sectarian and Kurdish identity while, in practice, concentrating power ever more narrowly around Saddam’s own clan and region. The 1991 uprisings that followed Iraq’s defeat in Kuwait, in which Shia and Kurdish areas rose against Saddam and were crushed with great bloodshed, hardened communal grievance into lasting collective memory. The 2003 invasion and the sectarian civil war that followed then inverted the old order, empowering the long-marginalised Shia majority and the Kurdish region while leaving Sunni Arabs, for the first time, a minority in a state no longer built for them. Each threshold reshuffled which community held power over the others.
Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq (1991); Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (1994).
On this reading, Iraq’s constituent communities each carried a strong pre-existing sense of collective identity — religious, tribal, and ethnic — long before 1921, and the modern nation has struggled to be more than the sum of these older loyalties. Tribal structure remained a powerful organising force throughout the century, even under an outwardly secular republic and a Ba’ath Party that officially scorned tribalism: Saddam Hussein himself, particularly after 1991, rebuilt his regime’s security around loyal tribal networks from his home region. Religious authority, centred on Najaf’s marja’iyya for the Shia majority, offered an alternative source of legitimacy that repeatedly outlasted and outweighed the secular state’s own claim on its citizens’ loyalty. Kurdish identity, meanwhile, was consolidated less by the Iraqi state than against it, through decades of rebellion and repression that culminated in the de facto autonomy the Kurdistan Region has held since 1991. On this account, state and nation in Iraq were never securely bound together, because the deeper loyalties of tribe, sect, and ethnicity supplied identity more powerfully, and more durably, than any national symbol Baghdad could offer in return.
Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (1994); Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq (1991).
The enduring force this lens identifies is the competition between the central Iraqi state’s claim to a single national loyalty and the older, deeper loyalties of sect, tribe, and ethnicity that the state has never fully absorbed. Whichever regime has governed Baghdad — monarchy, republic, Ba’athist dictatorship, or the power-sharing democracy installed after 2003 — it has had to negotiate constantly with communal structures it could not simply abolish: the religious authority of Najaf, the tribal networks of the countryside, and the separate national aspiration of the Kurds. Amatzia Baram’s study of Ba’athist ideology shows even Saddam’s avowedly secular, pan-Arab state reaching back to appeals to tribe and, late in his rule, to Islam itself, once other sources of legitimacy had been exhausted. The post-2003 order formalised this competition rather than resolving it, allocating the presidency, premiership, and speakership among Kurd, Shia Arab, and Sunni Arab by informal convention. What best explains Iraq’s development, on this account, is this unresolved contest between a national state that claims singular loyalty and communal structures — religious, tribal, ethnic — that have repeatedly proven more durable than the state’s own institutions.
Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq (1991); Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (1994).
Explains history through geography, natural resources, trade, demographics, technology and economic structures. This lens explores how the physical environment and material conditions have influenced historical change.
The land itself explains much of Iraq’s history. The country occupies the plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which rise in the mountains of Turkey and flow southeast across a hot, arid landscape before joining and emptying into the Persian Gulf at the head of a narrow, easily blockaded coastline around Basra. For millennia this floodplain supported some of the densest agricultural populations on earth, its fertility entirely dependent on irrigation canals that required constant, organised maintenance and made large-scale cooperation, and large-scale vulnerability, a permanent feature of life on the plain. In the twentieth century a second resource transformed the country’s fortunes: vast oil reserves, discovered at Kirkuk in the north in 1927 and later at Rumaila and other fields near Basra in the south, placed Iraq among the most oil-rich states on earth. Because the oil, like the water, is unevenly distributed — concentrated in the Kurdish north and the Shia south, while political power long sat with a Sunni Arab elite in the centre — the map of Iraq’s resources has rarely lined up neatly with the map of its power, and control over oil revenue has been at the centre of the country’s conflicts for a century.
Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities: Surveys of Ancient Settlement and Land Use on the Central Floodplain of the Euphrates (1981); Arbella Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (2019).
The economic turning points track the discovery, capture, and disruption of Iraq’s resource wealth. The 1927 discovery of oil at Kirkuk, developed by the British-dominated Iraq Petroleum Company, tied the new state’s finances to a resource controlled largely by foreign firms for its first half-century. The 1972 nationalisation of the oil industry then handed Baghdad direct control over its main source of revenue just before the 1970s price shocks multiplied that revenue many times over, funding the rapid state-building and militarisation of the Ba’athist years. The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) reversed this windfall into massive debt, and the international sanctions imposed after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait then cut Iraq off from oil markets almost entirely for over a decade, collapsing living standards and creating a black-market economy around the United Nations’ limited Oil-for-Food programme. The 2003 invasion and the years of sectarian conflict and Islamic State occupation that followed further devastated oil infrastructure in the north, including around Kirkuk, before postwar reconstruction slowly restored output. Each threshold is legible directly in oil production figures, state revenue, and the price of basic goods.
Arbella Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold (2019); Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (2010).
On this reading, Iraq’s internal divisions are written into its economic geography as much as into its politics. The oil-rich north around Kirkuk, contested between Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen populations, and the oil-rich south around Basra and Rumaila, populated overwhelmingly by Shia Arabs, sit at opposite ends of a country whose political and administrative centre, Baghdad, controls neither field directly. Arbella Bet-Shlimon’s study of Kirkuk shows how the discovery of oil there in 1927 did not create a settled boundary of belonging but instead intensified competition over who counted as a rightful “Kirkuki,” as oil jobs and oil revenue turned the city into a prize each community had reason to claim. Southern Iraq’s Shia population, meanwhile, generated much of the state’s oil wealth through Rumaila and neighbouring fields while receiving a share of political power that long lagged behind its economic contribution and its demographic majority. State and nation, on this account, were never bound together by a shared economic bargain; instead the uneven geography of oil built a lasting grievance into the country’s founding arrangement, one that reconstruction and revenue-sharing agreements have not fully resolved even a century later.
Arbella Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold (2019).
The long-term force that best explains Iraq’s trajectory, on this reading, is the concentration of the country’s wealth-generating resources — water and, above all, oil — in particular regions, combined with the repeated use of that wealth to fund an increasingly centralised and coercive state. From the ancient irrigation economy that first required organised cooperation on the Mesopotamian plain, through the oil wealth that funded the Ba’ath Party’s totalitarian ambitions in the 1970s, to the sanctions that impoverished ordinary Iraqis while the state itself endured, control over resource revenue has repeatedly determined who could hold power and how. Joy Gordon’s account of the 1990s sanctions regime shows how thoroughly the international community’s own economic tools became entangled with this same logic, devastating Iraqi civil society while leaving the political calculus in Baghdad largely unchanged. Reconstruction since 2003 has reproduced the same pattern in a new form: oil revenue remains the overwhelming source of state income, and disputes over its distribution between Baghdad, the Kurdistan Region, and the provinces remain the country’s most persistent source of friction. What best explains Iraq over the long run, then, is this recurring economics of concentrated resource wealth converted into centralised, contested power.
Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities (1981); Arbella Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold (2019); Joy Gordon, Invisible War (2010).
Not a fifth lens, but the point the whole engine exists to make: historians describe the same country differently because they weigh its causes differently.
The origin of Iraq’s fragility is the sharpest dispute. The consensus and cultural readings treat the country’s divisions as substantially real and prior — three communities with genuinely different histories, memories, and loyalties, brought together in a state that has struggled ever since to bind them. The revisionist reading, particularly Pursley’s challenge to the “artificial state” thesis, argues that this framing overstates how separate and how ancient these divisions really were, and that much of Iraq’s instability reflects governing practices — first colonial, then national — rather than the population’s own prior fragmentation.
The 1920 revolt against British rule divides the lenses in a related way. The consensus reading treats it as a brief, fragile flash of unity soon undone by the hard business of governing; the revisionist reading treats it as real evidence of an Iraqi national sentiment forming earlier, and more genuinely, than the “state before nation” story allows.
On one point three of the four perspectives converge, though for different reasons: Iraq’s oil wealth and its political power have rarely aligned, whether one blames colonial border-drawing, sectarian favouritism, or simple economic geography. They part on which comes first — the sect, the tribe, the border, or the barrel.
Reference status: every work cited is verified and correctly attributed — Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (2000); Phebe Marr & Ibrahim al-Marashi, The Modern History of Iraq (4th ed., 2017); Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (1978); Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country, 1914–1932 (2007); Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied (2003); Sara Pursley, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq (2019); Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (2011); Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (1994; 2nd ed. 2003); Amatzia Baram, Culture, History, and Ideology in the Formation of Ba’thist Iraq, 1968-89 (1991); Robert McC. Adams, Heartland of Cities (1981); Arbella Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (2019); Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (2010). Faleh Abdul-Jabar’s The Shi’ite Movement in Iraq (2003) was dropped from the citation list: no live official-publisher or Internet Archive page could be found for it (it is out of print and Saqi’s current catalogue no longer carries it), and per convention a Google Books listing is not an acceptable substitute — the two affected cells (Cultural/Religious/Political: Historical Backbone and National Formation Story) are fully supported by the remaining Nakash and Baram citations. Pursley’s “artificial state” critique and Dodge’s continuity-of-coercion thesis are contested reinterpretations, not settled consensus, and are presented as such throughout the Revisionist row. Maliki’s State of Law seat count corrected to 28 (from an initial 29) and endpoint-coda facts independently re-verified against 2025–2026 reporting on 2026-07-28: the Nov 2025 election, April 2026 Amidi presidency, May 2026 al-Zaidi premiership, the Feb–April 2026 Iraq-proxy war and April 8 ceasefire, the Sadr/AAH/Kataib Imam Ali disarmament moves against Kataib Hezbollah/Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba’s refusal, the Sept 30 2026 disarmament deadline, and the KRG’s confirmed 41% federal-budget-share shortfall all checked out against independent sources (Reuters, AP, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, CNBC, Shafaq News, Rudaw, The National, FDD’s Long War Journal, Times of Israel). The PMF casualty figure (“roughly 85”) is a reasonable estimate consistent with independent reporting (a single April 7 strike alone killed 73, on top of earlier March losses) but no single authoritative running total was found, so it should be read as approximate.
Iraq’s most recent chapter opened with an election and closed, for now, in an unfinished war. The parliamentary election of 11 November 2025 produced no majority: Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani’s Reconstruction and Development coalition won the most seats, 46 of 329, followed by Nouri al-Maliki’s Iran-aligned State of Law bloc with 28, on a turnout of just over 56 percent. Nearly six months of deadlock followed before parliament elected Nizar Amidi president in April 2026; both Sudani and Maliki then withdrew their candidacies for prime minister to break the impasse, and the dominant Shia bloc nominated Ali al-Zaidi, a 40-year-old banker and political outsider who took office on 14 May 2026 as Iraq’s youngest-ever prime minister, with only 14 of 23 cabinet posts initially confirmed.
Government formation had barely finished when, on 28 February 2026, Israel and the United States opened a war against Iran that turned Iraq into a battlefield by proxy. Iran-aligned militias operating under the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and an “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” banner launched hundreds of drone and rocket attacks on US positions from bases across the country, while US and Israeli strikes killed roughly 85 PMF fighters and dozens of others — Peshmerga, Kurdish-opposition fighters, soldiers, and civilians — before a ceasefire took hold in early April. The Kurdistan Region, especially Erbil, absorbed hundreds of Iranian strikes aimed nominally at American and Iranian-Kurdish-opposition targets. Baghdad condemned the strikes on its own forces while insisting it would not let Iraqi territory be used to attack Iran.
In the war’s aftermath the militia question has come to define Iraqi politics. In May and June 2026 the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr dissolved his militia and folded it into state institutions, and two smaller Iran-aligned factions agreed to surrender their weapons, but Kataib Hezbollah and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba refused. Prime Minister al-Zaidi has set 30 September 2026 as the deadline for full militia disarmament, tied to the scheduled end of the US-led coalition’s combat mission — already drawn down from its main bases toward hubs in Kurdistan and Syria — and plans Iraq’s first high-level visit to Washington in July 2026, even as the unresolved militias cloud the trip. Baghdad’s relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government remain similarly unsettled: a September 2025 deal restored Kurdish oil exports through the federal marketing system, but the KRG reports Baghdad has delivered barely 41 percent of its legally owed budget share since 2023. Iraq’s oldest problem — a state assembled from three communities, and never quite certain who it belongs to — remains, at the time of writing, open.
Endpoint facts verified against 2025–2026 reporting (Reuters, Al Jazeera, Associated Press, The National, Times of Israel, Rudaw, FDD’s Long War Journal, Shafaq News, and continuously updated 2026 Iran-war reference pages); see the accompanying report for a full list flagged for independent re-verification given the pace of events.
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Iraq’s war history spans more than four decades of near-continuous war. After the prolonged and devastating Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), Saddam Hussein’s government invaded Kuwait, partly to gain control over its oil wealth and relieve the severe economic pressures caused by the war. The invasion immediately triggered the 1991 Gulf War, as the United States and its allies intervened to expel Iraqi forces and protect the stability of the Gulf oil-producing states. Iraq then endured a decade of UN sanctions and weapons inspections before the US-led invasion in 2003 overthrew Saddam Hussein’s government.
The resulting power vacuum fuelled a prolonged insurgency, sectarian civil war, and the rise of the Islamic State, which seized large swathes of Iraqi territory in 2014. In 2024, the Iraqi Security Forces and Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces continue operations against residual Islamic State cells, while Iranian-aligned militias remain a significant domestic power factor.
The 2003 Iraq War began after the United States accused Saddam Hussein’s government of possessing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism.
Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 over oil disputes, war debts, and territorial claims, triggering the Gulf War led by the United States and its allies.
The Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) was a prolonged conflict between Iraq and Iran that caused massive casualties and economic devastation on both sides.
ISIS captured major Iraqi cities in 2014, including Mosul, leading to a new phase of conflict involving Iraqi, Kurdish, US, and coalition forces.
Iraq was created from former Ottoman provinces that became a British-controlled mandate after World War I, then gained independence as a kingdom in 1932. A coup ended the monarchy in 1958, and strongmen dominated politics until 2003, when a US-led invasion removed Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. Iraq’s mix of Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, Kurds, and smaller minorities has long shaped political competition and unrest.
According to UCDP, Iraq’s main armed conflict is between the Iraqi government and the Islamic State (IS), which has stayed active after its 2017 defeat, especially in rural areas. Another driver is tensions among state-linked armed groups: Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) militias, many with links to Iran, are officially under state control but often act independently. Disputes between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) also create security gaps.
Violence is lower than during IS’s peak in 2014–2017, but attacks continue; UCDP notes fighting slightly intensified in 2024, with many casualties from Iraqi airstrikes on IS hideouts. Northern Iraq is also affected by Turkey’s operations against the PKK. Civilians have faced severe harm, including IS’s mass killings and displacement of minorities like Yazidis, and deadly crackdowns on protest movements since 2019.
Sources: UCDP; CIA World Factbook.
Iran views Iraq as a critical strategic buffer against US military presence, Sunni extremists like ISIS, and rivals such as Saudi Arabia. Post-2003 US invasion, Tehran expanded influence via Shia political groups, militias, and religious ties, creating a land corridor to Syria and Lebanon. Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) evolved from anti-ISIS defenders into tools advancing Tehran’s regional aims, including proxy operations against Israel and the US. Despite waning dominance, Iran maintains sway over Sunni politicians, Kurdish factions like the PUK, and economic dependencies, constraining Iraq’s sovereignty and foreign policy autonomy.
Sources: Carnegie Endowment, Middle East Council on Foreign Relations, MERI
Iraq’s foreign policy is fragmented by powerful non-state actors (NSAs), particularly Iran-aligned militias within the PMF, which undermine the federal government’s authority. Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani pursues ‘guarded neutrality’ amid regional tensions, but NSAs conduct attacks on US forces and Israel, violating sovereignty and drawing retaliatory strikes. Internal fractures, including sectarian parties and transnational loyalties, make Baghdad reactive rather than proactive. Without reasserting control over NSAs, integrating cooperative elements, and enforcing a state monopoly on force, Iraq risks remaining a proxy battleground.
Sources: MERI, Carnegie Endowment, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung
Iraq navigates great power competition by maintaining ties with the US for security against ISIS remnants while deepening economic links with Iran. It balances Turkey and Gulf states through projects like the Development Road, potentially shifting influence from Tehran toward Ankara and GCC orbits. Efforts to curb groups like PKK/PJAK signal regional responsibility, but domestic elite divisions and militia influence limit unified policy. Baghdad seeks ‘good neighbor’ diplomacy to reduce tensions, leveraging investments for stability, yet external pressures from Iran, US, Turkey, and others perpetuate vulnerability.
Sources: Arab Center Washington DC, Carnegie Endowment, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung
Formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq was occupied by the United Kingdom during World War I. In 1920, it became a League of Nations mandate under UK administration.
Iraq attained independence as a kingdom in 1932.
In 1958, a coup overthrew the monarchy and Iraq was proclaimed a republic. In practice, the country was ruled by a succession of strongmen until 2003; the last was SADDAM Hussein, who ruled from 1979 to 2003.
Territorial disputes with Iran led to an inconclusive and costly war from 1980 to 1988. In 1990, Iraq seized Kuwait but was expelled by US-led UN coalition forces during the two-month-long Gulf War of 1991. After Iraq’s expulsion, the UN Security Council required Iraq to scrap all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles and to allow UN verification inspections; continued noncompliance with UNSC resolutions led to the Second Gulf War in 2003, when US-led forces ousted the SADDAM regime.
In 2005, Iraqis approved a constitution in a national referendum and elected a 275-member Council of Representatives (COR). The COR approved most of the cabinet ministers, marking the transition to Iraq’s first constitutional government in nearly a half-century.
The constitution also established the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), a semi-autonomous region administering the governorates of Erbil, Dahuk, and As Sulaymaniyah. Iraq has held four national legislative elections since 2006, most recently in 2021; the COR approved Mohammad Shia’ al-SUDANI as prime minister in 2022. Iraq has repeatedly postponed provincial council elections last held in 2013, and since 2019 the prime minister has had authority to appoint governors rather than provincial councils.
Between 2014 and 2017, Iraq conducted a military campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham (ISIS) to recapture territory seized by the group in 2014. In 2017, then-Prime Minister Haydar al-ABADI publicly declared victory against ISIS, although military operations against the group continue in rural areas.
Also in 2017, Baghdad forcefully seized disputed territories across central and northern Iraq from the KRG after a non-binding Kurdish independence referendum.
According to UCDP, Iraq is affected by multiple state-based conflicts involving different pairs of actors. The Government of Iraq continues to confront Islamic State (IS) as an intrastate conflict. In the north, Turkey’s conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) extends into Iraqi territory through cross-border operations. Iraq is also touched by the broader Iran–Israel interstate confrontation, which can intersect with events in and around Iraq.
UCDP records civilian deaths both from combat-related incidents and from one-sided violence. In state-based fighting, some civilians are recorded as killed collaterally (18 in total, including 14 in intrastate conflict), reflecting the risks when operations occur near communities. UCDP also records deliberate one-sided killings of civilians (9 total), attributed mainly to IS (8) and to the Government of Iraq (1). These patterns indicate threats from both insurgent attacks and security operations.
Iraq’s security situation is shaped by armed actors whose main disputes are not only internal. UCDP’s dyads show how regional conflicts overlap on Iraqi soil: Turkey pursues the PKK across borders, and the Iran–Israel rivalry can spill into Iraq through escalation dynamics and targeting linked to the wider regional contest. This layering makes it harder to protect civilians, because violence can shift locations quickly and involve actors with different goals and rules of engagement.
Sources: UCDP data.
Iraqi forces fight IS cells and networks inside Iraq. UCDP records both collateral civilian deaths in state-based fighting and a smaller number of deliberate killings by government forces against civilians.
IS wages an insurgency against state authorities and security forces, seeking to undermine control and governance. UCDP records deliberate one-sided killings by IS against civilians, alongside harm to civilians linked to wider combat activity.
Turkey conducts cross-border operations targeting PKK positions in and around northern Iraq. Such operations can expose nearby communities to displacement risks and collateral civilian harm when fighting occurs near populated areas.
The PKK operates from mountainous areas and is targeted by Turkish security operations that spill into Iraq. UCDP does not list the PKK as a one-sided violence actor against civilians here, but clashes and strikes can still put civilians in contested areas at risk.
Iran appears in UCDP as a party in both an interstate dyad with Israel and an intrastate dyad with IS. Military activity linked to these confrontations can contribute to collateral risks for civilians in areas where strikes, raids, or armed engagements occur.
Israel is listed by UCDP in an interstate conflict dyad with Iran that intersects with the wider regional confrontation. When such hostilities affect Iraqi territory or airspace, civilians can face indirect risks from escalation and collateral damage around military targets.
Iraq’s conflict picture combines an ongoing insurgency by IS, cross-border fighting between Turkey and the PKK in northern Iraq, and a wider Iran–Israel confrontation that can spill into the country. These overlapping conflicts persist because armed groups retain operational space, and regional rivals project force across borders.
Army officers overthrow Iraq’s Hashemite monarchy, declare a republic, and pivot away from close ties with Britain. The coup sets a pattern of military intervention in politics that weakens institutions and shapes later authoritarian rule and coup-prone politics.
The Baath Party takes control in a bloodless coup, building a security state centered on Arab nationalism and heavy oil-state patronage. This regime structure underpins Saddam Hussein’s later dominance, centralizing power and heightening future center–periphery and ethnic tensions.
Saddam Hussein becomes president, purging rivals and building a highly personalized dictatorship. His rule militarizes society, represses Kurds and Shiites, and steers Iraq into costly regional conflicts, laying deep grievances that later feed rebellion and sectarian polarization.
Iraq invades revolutionary Iran, triggering an eight‑year war that kills hundreds of thousands. Baghdad relies on oil revenues, foreign loans, and repression, emerging heavily indebted and militarized. War experience, Kurdish insurgency, and regional rivalries shape today’s fragmented security environment.
Iraqi forces conduct the Anfal campaign, involving mass killings, village destruction, and chemical attacks against Kurds. The campaign entrenches Kurdish mistrust of Baghdad and fuels demands for autonomy, underpinning today’s semi‑independent Kurdistan Region and ongoing tensions with Iraqi and Turkish forces.
Iraq invades Kuwait, prompting a US-led coalition war and Iraqi defeat. Subsequent UN sanctions and disarmament demands severely weaken Iraq’s economy and military, while entrenching Saddam’s isolation and US–Iraqi hostility that later justifies the 2003 invasion disrupting Iraq’s state order.
Post‑Gulf War uprisings erupt in Shiite south and Kurdish north; Saddam’s forces crush southern revolt, but Kurds gain de facto autonomy under US‑UK no‑fly zones. This entrenches Iraq’s internal fragmentation, paving the way for a federal Kurdish region and multiple armed actors.
US‑UK forces invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam, and dissolve the army and Baath structures. Resulting power vacuum and flawed occupation fuel insurgency, sectarian conflict, and militia growth. These dynamics underpin today’s fragmented security forces and the conditions that later enable Islamic State’s rise.
Iraq adopts a new constitution creating a federal system and recognizing the Kurdistan Region; elections bring Shiite‑led governments to power. While institutionalizing pluralism, the process deepens sectarian politics and disputed territories, shaping today’s contested governance and Kurdish–Baghdad fault lines.
After the Samarra shrine bombing, Shiite and Sunni militias fight a brutal sectarian war alongside insurgents and US forces. Mass killings and displacement reshape Iraq’s demography, deepen Sunni marginalization, and create fertile ground for extremist groups that later evolve into Islamic State.
US combat troops withdraw, leaving Iraqi forces and fragmented politics to manage security. Prime Minister Nouri al‑Maliki centralizes power and alienates many Sunnis. Weakened institutions and unresolved grievances aid jihadist regrouping, setting conditions for Islamic State’s rapid expansion in 2014.
Islamic State seizes Mosul and large areas of northern and western Iraq, declaring a “caliphate.” A US‑led coalition, Iraqi forces, Kurds, and militias eventually roll back IS by 2017, but IS networks go underground, shaping today’s low‑intensity insurgency and rural hideouts.
Large protests demand jobs, services, and an end to corruption and militia influence; security forces and armed groups respond violently. Government reshuffles and early elections follow, but militias retain power, leaving a hybrid security order that complicates counter‑IS and Kurdish–Baghdad dynamics.
US–Iran tensions and Turkish cross‑border operations against the PKK intensify on Iraqi soil. Iraqi territory hosts rival armed actors and foreign strikes, fragmenting sovereignty. This environment persists into 2024–2026, as Baghdad confronts residual IS cells while managing Kurdish and Turkish pressures.
