Iraq

Iraq is Mesopotamia — the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates — and it is not an exaggeration to say that more of the basic equipment of human civilisation was invented here than anywhere else. Writing, around 3200 BC. The city, at Uruk, before that. The wheel in its earliest attested use. Codified law, arithmetic in base sixty — which is why an hour has sixty minutes and a circle 360 degrees — the sexagesimal place-value system, astronomy, the first named author in history, and the first written literature.

The modern country covers 438,317 km², about five and a half times Czechia, with roughly 46 million people. It is overwhelmingly Arab with a large Kurdish minority in the north, majority Shia with a substantial Sunni population, and it holds the two holiest cities of Shia Islam outside Arabia. Its economy is oil: crude accounts for well over 90% of government revenue, which is both the reason the state functions and the reason it stops functioning whenever the oil does.

ʿIrāq is an Arabic word attested from the seventh century, and its origin is argued. The most widely accepted reading takes it from a root meaning the shore or the deeply rooted, well-watered land — the riverbank country. A competing derivation traces it to Sumerian Uruk, the city, through Middle Persian Erāq. Either way it is a name about the rivers, and the rivers are the country.

Iraq is four countries stacked on top of each other, and they look nothing alike. Understanding that is most of what you need to understand about its politics as well as its landscape.

The rivers themselves: the Tigris (Arabic Dijlah) rises in Turkey and runs through Mosul and Baghdad; the Euphrates (Furat) rises in Turkey, crosses Syria and passes Nasiriyah. They join at al-Qurnah to form the Shatt al-Arab, which runs past Basra to the Gulf and forms the disputed border with Iran that started the 1980 war. Iraq's coastline is about 58 km long — for a country of this size it is essentially landlocked, and that fact has driven its foreign policy for a century.

The slowest and most serious crisis in Iraq is not political. The two rivers that made the country are carrying a fraction of the water they used to, and the trend is one-way. This is the thing that will still be a problem when everything else on this page is history.

Iraq did not start this war and is not formally a party to it, and it has been one of the places most damaged by it. When the United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026, Iraq was immediately caught between the two: American bases sit on Iraqi soil, Iranian-aligned militias operate inside Iraqi politics, and Iraq's oil leaves through the Gulf.

Iraq sits between roughly 29° and 37° north, bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the south, and Jordan and Syria to the west — six neighbours, which is a great deal of border for a country this shape.

Around 4000 BC, on the flat silt of southern Iraq, people began doing something no one had done before: living in very large numbers in one place. Uruk — the city that may have given the country its name — reached perhaps 40,000 to 80,000 people by 3100 BC, at a time when there was nothing else remotely like it on Earth. Everything else followed from the administrative problem that creates.

Writing was invented, as far as anyone can tell, to do accounts. The earliest tablets from Uruk, around 3200 BC, are records of barley, beer, sheep and labour. Pictographic marks pressed into wet clay with a reed stylus gradually became the wedge-shaped signs of cuneiform, which was then adapted to write Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Hittite and Old Persian and stayed in use for three thousand years — longer than the Latin alphabet has existed.

Sumer gave way to Akkad, and then to a long alternation between two powers: Babylon in the south and Assyria in the north. They shared a language, a script and a religion, and spent fifteen hundred years being extremely different from one another.

In 762 the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded a new capital on the Tigris: Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, laid out as a perfect circle with the palace and mosque at the centre. Within fifty years Baghdad was probably the largest city in the world, and for two centuries it was the intellectual centre of it.

In February 1258 a Mongol army under Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, took Baghdad after a two-week siege. The city was sacked over about a week, the last Abbasid caliph was executed — rolled in a carpet and trampled, so that no royal blood touched the ground — and the death toll, though the medieval figures of 800,000 or two million are not credible, was catastrophic.

Modern Iraq was assembled by Britain out of three Ottoman provinces after the First World War, and almost every structural problem the country has had since is traceable to how that was done.

Saddam Hussein took the presidency in July 1979 and opened with a filmed party purge in which named colleagues were led out of the hall to be shot. He governed for twenty-four years, and in that time Iraq fought two catastrophic wars and lived through thirteen years of sanctions.

The United States and United Kingdom invaded on 20 March 2003, on the stated grounds that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to al-Qaeda. Baghdad fell in three weeks. No weapons of mass destruction were found, the intelligence case was subsequently found by inquiries in both countries to have been presented with unwarranted certainty, and the al-Qaeda link did not exist before the invasion — though it very much did afterwards.

The insurgency against the occupation turned into something worse. The bombing of the al-Askari shrine at Samarra in February 2006 — one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, its golden dome destroyed — set off open sectarian war. Baghdad was ethnically cleansed neighbourhood by neighbourhood over about two years, with death squads on both sides and bodies found daily. The city's mixed districts, which had been genuinely mixed, largely stopped being so.

Iraq has lost more of its archaeological record in the last thirty-five years than in the previous three thousand, and most of it went not to bombs but to shovels.

Iraq is a federal parliamentary republic under the 2005 constitution, and it works considerably better than its reputation and considerably worse than its citizens want. It has held repeated genuinely competitive elections; it has also spent much of the last twenty years unable to form a government for months at a time.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq — Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, Duhok and Halabja governorates, about six million people — is constitutionally federal and practically close to autonomous: its own parliament, government, armed forces and, until recently, its own visa regime. For most of the last two decades it was the part of Iraq foreigners could actually visit.

Iraq held, until very recently, a set of religious communities that existed nowhere else and in some cases had been there since before Islam or before Christianity. Most of them are now in an advanced state of collapse, and this is one of the great quiet losses of the last thirty years.

Around 46 million people, and very young: the median age is about 21 and something like sixty per cent of Iraqis were born after 2003. That single demographic fact — a country where most people have no adult memory of Saddam Hussein and every memory of the last twenty years — is behind the 2019 protests and behind most of what will happen next.

There is an Arab saying that Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads. Iraq's self-image is bookish and it is earned: the country produced a disproportionate share of twentieth-century Arabic literature and effectively invented modern Arabic free verse.

Iraqi cooking is the direct heir of the oldest documented cuisine on Earth — the Yale culinary tablets of around 1750 BC record about forty recipes, mostly meat broths with leeks, garlic and onion, and the family resemblance to what is eaten today is not fanciful. It is a cuisine of rice, lamb, wheat, dates, sour flavours and enormous generosity of portion.

Iraq's national dish and its oldest — grilled river fish is on the Mesopotamian tablets — cooked on the bank of the Tigris at open apricot-wood fires, and eaten late, with the hands, on flatbread.

A city of roughly 8 million people, founded in 762, destroyed in 1258, and comprehensively rebuilt, bombed, fought over and rebuilt again since. Almost nothing above ground is older than the thirteenth century, and Baghdad is nonetheless one of the more interesting cities in the region — a place with a very strong sense of what it used to be and a lot of concrete blast walls.

Two of the four holiest cities in Shia Islam are in Iraq, and they receive a volume of pilgrimage that dwarfs the country's ordinary tourism by several orders of magnitude. They are also, for a non-Muslim visitor who behaves properly, among the most welcoming places in the country.

Southern Iraq is flat, hot, agricultural and stacked with the oldest cities in the world. It is also where the two rivers meet, where the oil is, and where the 2019 protests were fiercest.

Northern Iraq is the Assyrian heartland and the most religiously mixed part of the country, and it has been the most comprehensively wrecked in the last decade. It is also where the recovery has been most visible.

For Czech travellers: the MZV ČR advisory for Iraq is at the highest level and covers the whole country, Kurdistan included. The Czech Embassy in Baghdad is the responsible mission. Ordinary Czech travel insurance excludes war and unrest, so a standard policy is worth nothing here — read the exclusions rather than the brochure. Register in DROZD and note the mzv.cz emergency contacts before departure if you are in the region for any reason.

Writing about Iraq honestly means holding two things at once that most coverage keeps apart. This is the place where writing, cities, law, the wheel, arithmetic and literature were invented, and where a third of what a European calls their intellectual inheritance was translated, argued with and passed on. It is also a country where almost nobody alive has had an ordinary peacetime adulthood, and which as of this month is being hit again in someone else's war.

Neither of those cancels the other, and the trap is to let the second swallow the first. Iraq is not a synonym for a war. It is a real country with a book market, a maqam tradition, a dish it argues about, and a fifteen-million-person walk to Karbala — and the honest way to write about it is to give the civilisation the space it earns and then be straight about what has happened since.

The 2026 sections are dated on purpose and will be wrong soon. Where accounts conflict — the wider war produces contested claims daily — that is said rather than resolved, and the numbers here are the ones on the public record as of 6 September 2026. For the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is what has destroyed Iraq's oil revenue this year, there is a separate page.

On the images

The site's image store holds exactly one Iraq photograph — the hero — where a country with this much to look at would normally have twenty. That one is an illustration rather than a document: a domed brick complex above palm groves with mountains behind, which is atmospheric and corresponds to no identifiable Iraqi monument. Iraq's great shrine domes are gold, and Baghdad has no mountains behind it. It is used as a mood image and labelled as one, and there is deliberately no caption claiming it is anywhere in particular.

Three recipe images came from the shared folder. One was left out entirely: the masgouf photograph showed a whole unsplit fish on mashed potato with chips, and masgouf is defined by being butterflied flat from the back and served on bread with onion — wrong on the only feature that makes the dish itself. The other two are used with corrections stated in their captions: the timman bagilla has the dill right and no fava beans at all, and the kleicha are thumbprint biscuits with a date on top where real kleicha is rolled and sliced so the date shows as a spiral.