History · Iraq

Iraq: The Land Between the Rivers

Mesopotamia gave the world its first cities and its first writing — later the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, a kingdom stitched together by Britain, Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and two decades of war since 2003

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

A tall spiral brick minaret rising behind a long buttressed mud-brick wall, with rounded river stones in the foreground under a clear blue sky
The spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra, seen above the mosque's outer wall. (Taisir Mahdi / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0)

The oldest ground, and a young state

Iraq is Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates — where cities, writing, law codes and mathematics were invented more than five thousand years ago. It is also one of the youngest states in the region: its borders were drawn by Britain after the First World War, fusing three Ottoman provinces around Basra, Baghdad and Mosul into a single kingdom. The gap between that ancient depth and that modern, imposed shape runs through everything that has happened to Iraq since.

A short history

  1. c. 4000–2000 BCE

    Sumer and Akkad

    The first cities, cuneiform writing, the first empire.

  2. c. 1750 BCE

    Babylon

    Hammurabi's law code.

  3. 626–539 BCE

    Neo-Babylonian Empire

    Nebuchadnezzar; the Judean exile.

  4. 637 CE

    Islamic conquest

    Arab armies defeat the Sasanian Persians.

  5. 762

    Baghdad founded

    The Abbasid caliphate's capital and a centre of learning.

  6. 1258

    The Mongol sack

    Baghdad is destroyed; the last Abbasid caliph killed.

  7. 1534–1917

    Ottoman rule

    A contested frontier with Persia.

  8. 1921

    The Kingdom of Iraq

    Britain installs King Faisal.

  9. 1979–2003

    Saddam Hussein

    Dictatorship, the Iran war, Kuwait, and sanctions.

  10. 2003

    The US-led invasion

    Occupation, insurgency, and sectarian war.

  11. 2014–2017

    ISIS

    The Islamic State seizes and then loses a third of the country.

Cities and caliphs

Sumer, in the south, built the first cities — Uruk, Ur — and around 3200 BCE invented writing. Akkad under Sargon formed the first empire; Babylon gave the world Hammurabi's law code and, later, the Hanging Gardens and the Ishtar Gate.

Babylon and Baghdad

The blue-glazed Ishtar Gate of Babylon decorated with rows of relief animals
The Ishtar Gate of Babylon, built under Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BCE. Mesopotamia was conquered in turn by Persia, Alexander, and the Sasanian Persians. (Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons)
A 13th-century Arabic manuscript illustration of scholars in a library at Baghdad
A Baghdad library, in a 1237 illustration to the Maqamat of al-Hariri. Abbasid Baghdad, founded in 762, was one of the largest cities on Earth and a centre of translation and science. (Wikimedia Commons)

Iraq was also where the Sunni–Shia split took shape: the Caliph Ali was killed at Kufa in 661, and his son Husayn at Karbala in 680 — the central martyrdom of Shia Islam. Najaf and Karbala remain its holiest shrine cities. The Abbasid golden age ended in 1258, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad, killed the caliph, and wrecked the irrigation the region depended on. Ottoman rule from 1534 left Iraq a neglected frontier zone.

A kingdom made in London

Britain invaded Mesopotamia in the First World War and took it under a League of Nations mandate. After a costly anti-British revolt in 1920, Britain fused the three provinces into the Kingdom of Iraq and installed Faisal, a Hashemite prince of the Arab Revolt, as king in 1921.

A formal portrait of King Faisal I of Iraq in Arab dress
Faisal I, installed by Britain as king of Iraq in 1921. Oil was found near Kirkuk in 1927; Iraq gained nominal independence in 1932, with British bases retained. (Wikimedia Commons)

The monarchy was overthrown in a bloody coup on 14 July 1958, in which the king and prime minister were killed. A decade of coups followed, and in 1968 the Baath Party took power for good. Its enforcer, Saddam Hussein, became president in 1979.

Saddam's wars

Saddam ran a totalitarian personality cult. He invaded Iran in 1980, beginning an eight-year war that killed around half a million Iraqis and left the country in debt. He gassed the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing thousands in a day during the Anfal campaign against the Kurds. He invaded Kuwait in 1990, and a US-led coalition drove him out in six weeks in 1991 — after which he crushed Shia and Kurdish uprisings and drained the southern marshes as punishment. Thirteen years of comprehensive UN sanctions then devastated ordinary Iraqi life.

Invasion, insurgency, ISIS

In March 2003 the United States and Britain invaded, citing weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Baghdad fell in three weeks.

A large statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down by a crowd and a US military vehicle in a Baghdad square
The toppling of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, 9 April 2003. The occupation's decisions to disband the army and purge the Baath Party helped fuel a long insurgency and sectarian civil war. (U.S. military / Wikimedia Commons)

The occupation gave way to insurgency and then, especially after the 2006 bombing of a Shia shrine in Samarra, to a sectarian civil war that killed tens of thousands and cleansed Baghdad's mixed neighbourhoods. Violence fell by 2008; US forces left in 2011.

Then, in June 2014, the Islamic State — a regrouped offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, feeding on Sunni grievance under a sectarian government — swept across the north, took Mosul, declared a "caliphate", and committed genocide against the Yazidis. A three-year war by the Iraqi army, Kurdish forces, Iran-backed Shia militias and a US-led coalition retook the territory.

Block after block of flattened and shattered buildings in the old city of Mosul
The old city of Mosul after its recapture from ISIS in 2017, following a nine-month battle. Thousands of civilians were killed and much of western Mosul was destroyed. (Wikimedia Commons)

Iraq now

Iraq is a fragile parliamentary democracy run on ethno-sectarian power-sharing, with competing Iranian and American influence, powerful militias, and pervasive corruption. A youth-led uprising against that corruption and Iranian influence in 2019 was met with live fire that killed hundreds. A 2017 Kurdish independence referendum was rejected by Baghdad and reversed by force. The country remains almost wholly dependent on oil, and increasingly stressed by drought and shrinking rivers.

What Iraq carries

Iraq holds the deepest layer of urban human history and one of the region's shallowest states. Britain drew its borders around three provinces with a Shia majority, a Sunni Arab minority and a Kurdish north, and every regime since — the monarchy, the Baath, the post-2003 order — has struggled to make one nation of them. The ancient rivers are still there; the political community to match the country's name is still being fought over.

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