The mountains of Kurdistan are one of the oldest hearths of humanity where the passage of the saving of hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture was carried out. To the VII E and VI E thousand-year-old front J. - C., the men give up hills and mountains to be established in the plains. Today, it is on Mésopotamie that new the State-nation would like to found its historical identity and its referents.

Civilizations of Antiquity

The following millenia are marked by the passage of an organization of the village type to urban civilizations profiting from the surpluses of an agriculture which the irrigation could make intensive. It is the time of the city-States.  

Sumerian civilization marks the III E thousand-year-old, where the commercial exchanges are then possible by the writing and the use of a common language. Amorrites, wandering Semites come from the south, found a new empire with for Babylon center; Hammourabi (1793-1750) will be the most famous king.

Later, North takes its revenge with the Assyrian hegemony, whose apogee is under Assourbanipal (669-627), Ninive being then the capital. Babylon finds its preeminence under Nabuchodonosor II (605-562). The Assyrian Empire succumbs quickly. Mésopotamie is integrated in vast Empire achéménide.

Splendors of the Abbasid Empire

The conquest of Mésopotamie by the Arabs, towards 637 apr. J. - C., constitutes a date hinge. From 750, Baghdad is promoted capital Abbasid Empire, which extends to its apogee to the borders from the Maghreb, India and the Central Asia. Baghdad becomes the large metropolis of the civilized world, whose Haroun Al-Rachid, caliph Abbasid, contemporary of Charlemagne and immortalized by Thousand and One Nights, remains the symbol.

The Moslem empire is marked by the glare of its urban civilization and its intellectual expansion. The campaigns, thanks to a remarkable network of irrigation, know also a period of abundance. Idealized by the Arab memories, this “golden age” is definitively ruined by the Mongolian invasions. Baghdad falls in 1258.  

Iraq is then, and for a long time, withdrawn from the Arab domination. The Mesopotamian plain enters during one time of recession which the Ottoman Empire will be unable to suppress. The cultivated grounds become pastures for the herds of the nomads. A demographic decline, finally, accompanies the economic regression.

The British mandate and Iraq hachémite

After the First World War and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, the British supervision, pursuant to the agreement Sykes-Barb (1916), is exerted on Iraq. By the agreements of San Remo (1920), Great Britain receives mandate on the part of the League of Nations to manage the country. The borders are defined under the authority of the power agent: in 1925, the vilayet of Mosul is attached to the unit which already those of Baghdad and Bassora form: modern Iraq is made up. Hachémite, the emir Fayçal, goes up on the throne. Independence is proclaimed in 1932.  

Under monarchy hachémite, the country, which remains under British influence, is directed by Sunni big families. The beginnings of the oil economy, associated with a certain economic development, are at the origin of deep changes. An intermediate social layer (doctors, professors, engineers, civils servant, officers, intellectuals) emerges, while the increased pressure of feudal and urban oligarchy carries to very an high degree the misery of the rural masses. The seizure of power by the “free Officers” in Egypt (1952) has a deep repercussion here. Dissatisfaction grows, the political conscience is sharpened. The opposition gathers around two topics: the compliance with the democratic rules in the political life and the nationalist refusal to collaborate with the western powers. The army reverses monarchy in 1958.  

Republican Iraq and the mode baassist

The general Kassem, the strong man of the new republican mode, cannot regulate the social and political problems. In 1963, a coup d'etat makes it possible the Iraqi branch of the Arab socialist party Baath to seize the power. After 1968, this party, whose the personality of Saddam Hussein emerges quickly, becomes the single leading force of the country. Iraq enters then during a time of deep changes. The Baath party, by ensuring the control of the oil resources by their nationalization, provides the foundations of a modern and diversified economy. After the death of Nasser (1970), Iraq intends to play a preeminent part within the Pan-Arabism.  

The relations between Baghdad and Syria were always conflict, with the image of the hostile relationship between the two branches, Iraqi and Syrian woman, of the Baath party. Moreover, Iraq shows the given adversary of Israel. Resident of the Gulf, candidate to becoming a regional power, it leaves reinforced long conflict which opposes it to Iran (1980-1988).

But the crisis and the war of the Gulf (1990-1991) put temporarily a term at the regional ambitions of a country from now on very isolated within the Arab world. The consecutive Western embargo with the war of the Gulf, though partially raised in 1996 in consequence of a decision of the United Nations, assigns little oligarchy to the power but is felt very hard by the civil populations.  

The American intervention in 2003

This chapter must be added.