From its initial emergence as a British mandate following World War I, to the post-independence monarchy from 1932-1958, through the military coups that ushered in the rule of first the Baath Party in 1968 and then Saddam Hussein in 1979, external threats and internal tensions have characterized the history of Iraq. Now that all U.S. military forces have left the country, Iraq’s government once again faces the challenge of overcoming internal divisions, even as it becomes fully and solely responsible for Iraq’s security for the first time since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. Iraqi leaders must manage these interrelated challenges while trying
to reintegrate Iraq into the regional and international order from which it has been largely isolated since 1991.
It was scarcely a century ago that the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul were claimed by the British and reconstituted as the territory that was to become the sovereign state of Iraq. The country’s western half consists mostly of sparsely populated desert. The southernmost province of Basra contains nearly 60 percent of the country’s population and is primarily inhabited by Shiite Arabs. The central province of Baghdad has 20 percent of the population, comprised of predominantly Sunni Arabs. The remaining 20 percent of Iraqis are found in the northernmost province of Mosul, which is mostly Sunni Kurdish with pockets of Arab, Turkmen and other ethnic minorities. A Christian Arab minority was tolerated for most of modern Iraqi history but has been persecuted heavily since Saddam’s fall in 2003, resulting in its mass exodus. ...