It is located in Northern and Eastern hemispheres of the Earth. It is bordered by six nations: Iran to the East; Kuwait to the southeast; Turkey to the north; Syria to the west; Jordan to the southwest and Saudi Arabia to the south.
The country has a short 36 miles 58 km coastline along the northern end of the Persian Gulf. Regional Maps : Map of Asia. The blank outline map represents the country of Iraq in Western Asia. The country is mostly bounded by land but has a small coast on the Persian Gulf. The map can be dowloaded, printed, and used for coloring or educational purpose. This page was last updated on February 24, Home Asia Iraq. Governorates Map Where is Iraq? Outline Map Key Facts Flag. The outline map above represents the country of Iraq in Western Asia.
Salt Spring Island. Old Faithful Geyser. Kuril Islands. Cultus Lake, British Columbia. Cataract Canyon. Al-Anfal killed in just a few months an estimated 50, to , civilians, although Kurdish groups say it was closer to , While the genocide is most infamous for Saddam's use of chemical weapons, this map also shows the less-known but similarly brutal mass execution sites, where Kurdish families were slaughtered en masse, and resettlement camps.
The US responded tepidly at the time — it was tilting toward Saddam in his ongoing war against Iran — but Al-Anfal later became a justification for international action against Iraq, and is a big part of why Iraqi Kurds were granted autonomy after Saddam was toppled in On August 2, , Iraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait following disputes about oil production, and installed a puppet regime to run the country.
After several months of occupation, a UN-sanctioned international coalition led by the US used ground and air forces to forces Iraqi forces out. The ground campaign to push back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was surprisingly short, beginning with the advance of coalition forces from Saudi Arabia into both Kuwait and Iraq on February 24, Bush declared a ceasefire.
The air war, however, began on January 17, and was devoted to destroying the Iraqi air force, anti-aircraft facilities, command infrastructure, and other military targets. Iraq responded by launching missile attacks on both Israel and Saudi Arabia; while Israel was not involved in the conflict directly, Iraq hoped to draw it into armed conflict and convince other Arab states to abandon the coalition. Israel exercised restraint, however, and the Arab forces remained part of the coalition.
Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia Islamists in the south rose up in rebellion, among others, to oust Saddam. President Bush, who had thousands of troops stationed mere miles away, called on Iraqis to rise up. Many Iraqis believed the rebels would receive US military backing, but the support never came. While the rebels made large advances at first, particularly in the south, within a few weeks Saddam had defeated them and slaughtered thousands in reprisal killings.
The episode left Iraq's opposition devastated, ultimately strengthening Saddam's hold. Many Iraqis who had risen up felt betrayed by the US and by Bush personally. Some American foreign policy officials and scholars also felt the US should have used the opportunity to push all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam, a belief they advocated for years and finally carried into the George W.
Bush administration a decade later, providing part of the ideological basis for the US-led invasion. After the Gulf War, the United States, France, and Britain set up "no-fly zones," in which Iraqi aircraft were forbidden to fly, in the northern tip and south of Iraq.
The ostensible purpose of the zones were to protect the Kurdish and Shia populations from Iraqi air strikes after Saddam's massacres. In practice, this meant British and American aircraft patrolling Iraqi airspace continuously between the two Gulf Wars. The Iraqi military would frequently shoot at the international aircraft patrolling the zones, though they never shot down a manned plane.
After Operation Desert Fox in , when the US bombed Iraq ostensibly as punishment for not complying with UN weapons inspectors, the low-level conflict over the no-fly zone escalated. Saddam offered a reward to anyone who shot down an American or British plane, while the Western forces began regularly targeting Iraqi anti-air and other military emplacements. This all goes to show that the US military never really left Iraq — the no-fly zone only lifted just before the Coalition invasion began in The marshes in southeastern Iraq weren't just a beautiful ecosystem; their bounty also fed , people by But after Shia insurgents began using them as a base to hide from goverment forces — one Iraqi called them "our Sherwood forest" — Saddam drained the water out of them.
By diverting the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates river, Saddam deprived insurgents of a sanctuary. He also forced the so-called Marsh Arabs who lived nearby to flee; the poulation of the largest nearby city fell from 67, to 6, by Iraqi engineer Azzam Alwash led a movement to restore them after Saddam was desposed, but the Draining of the Marshes proves just how far Saddam was willing to go to more effectively kill his Shia opponents.
Pacific Standard. During the period between the first and second Gulf War, the US and its allies enforced a containment policy against Iraq, and while military measures like no-fly zones see above played a role, the main mechanism was economic sanctions. Then-UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, confronted with that figure, famously said, "we think the price is worth it.
Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College, University of London notes that three out of four surveys examining the period found no changes in child mortality rates following the Gulf War.
That's hardly a settled point — Columbia researcher Richard Garfield, for one, put the number of excess child deaths between and at , But, as the chart shows, this is a point where little is known with much certainty. Female bodybuilder enthusiast and BBC. While the United States was the prime contributor of troops to both the first Gulf War and the second, both were backed by international coalitions contributing troops, humanitarian aid, and other assistance.
In , that coalition was backed by a UN Security Council mandate and included among its ranks most of Western Europe notably France and Germany as well as several of Iraq's neighbors, like Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia which was actively threatened by Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and was itself invaded by Iraq in the course of the war.
As you can see in the above order of battle, French and Arab forces actively participated in the ground attack on Iraq. The invasion had no such consensus backing it. Only four countries — the US, UK, Poland, and Australia — participated in the initial invasion, and while others assisted in various capacities, it was nonetheless mostly an American and British operation. The invasion was mainly staged from Kuwait, with troops advancing northeast before reaching Baghdad in the second week of April.
The ground advance was supplemented by air strikes, beginning in Baghdad at the Presidential Palace but escalating in scale as the invasion began in earnest. About a week into the invasion, the rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into northern Iraq and joined forces with Kurdish rebels, claiming the city of Kirkuk on April 10; American and Australian special forces were charged with securing the western portion of the country and preventing possible SCUD missile launches.
Before the invasion, General Tommy Franks claims that the US, using a double agent, successfully tricked the Iraqi government into believing that the US would invade through Jordan, catching them off-guard when the actual invasion from Kuwait began. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. As you can see in the chart, the combined forces of the Iraqi army were comparatively minuscule in as compared to In , the US government essentially disbanded the Iraqi army.
The plan was part of a policy called de-Baathification, the purpose of which was to cleanse the government of any influence from former members of Saddam's Baath Party so the ancien regime didn't reassert itself after its toppling. The problem with this plan is that a large number of recently unemployed Iraqi soldiers went and joined insurgent militias, greatly strengthening the anti-government forces while simultaneously stripping the government of its military capabilities.
The effects of de-Baathification redound to this day: ISIS has become infinitely more skilled by incorporating skilled Saddam-era officers.
At its peak level of influence in , AQI controlled significant chunks of Sunni Iraq, and even set up a quasi-government along harsh Islamic lines in some of the land it controlled.
This Anbar Awakening, named after the province in which it began, resulted in former Sunni insurgents partnering with the American and Iraqi militaries to uproot AQI.
AQI was roundly defeated, and lost effective control over almost all of its previous domain. If it angers the population, they can provide critical intelligence and cooperation that would allow the Iraqi military to crush them. No one suffered more from the Iraq War than Iraqi civilians. The fluctuations in this chart show the three distinct stages of the war. The first, from to , was the war between the US-led invasion force and Iraqi forces, including government forces as well as Islamist and nationalist insurgents.
Civilians in this period were bystanders. In early , however, Iraq's conflict became what is often described as a civil war, fought among three factions: Sunni insurgents, including Islamist extremists and former Saddam loyalists; Shia militias, some of them rogue members of state security forces; and the US-led occupation force.
In this period, which lasted two awful years, civilians were often the target of the violence, with bombings and death squads seeking to ethnically cleanse Baghdad in particular. While conditions improved significantly after , many fear that the current crisis could reignite the sectarian hatreds and militias of to There are few grimmer symbols for the devastation of the Iraq War than what it did to Baghdad's once-diverse neighborhoods.
The map on the left shows the city's religious make-up in Mixed neighborhoods, then the norm, are in yellow. The map on right shows what it looked like by , after two awful years of Sunni-Shia killing: bombings shown with red dots , death squads, and militias. Coerced evictions and thousands of deaths effectively cleansed neighborhoods, to be mostly Shia blue or mostly Sunni red. Since late , the sectarian civil war has ramped back up, in Baghdad and nationwide.
This map is hypothetical, but the fact that it exists at all speaks to ISIS's ambition. The correctness of the map aside there is not actually much oil in this area, despite the little derrick icons , it shows that the group has been thinking about the economics of its war and how to self-fund. It currently controls much of this desired territory, and some reports indicate ISIS has enough some oil production and refinery facilities, a big step toward being able to fund its own war.
Institute for the Study of War. Since becoming Prime Minister in , he has centralized a great deal of power in his office, and run the Iraqi government along Shia sectarian lines.
Naturally, this infuriated Sunnis, who organized a series of protests around the country in These continued into , and the Maliki government began to see them as a serious problem.
Unable or unwilling to resolve the protests politically, the Maliki government turned to force. His security forces killed 56 people at protest in the northern town Hawija alone in April The forcible breakup of the protest movement convinced some Sunnis that their only solution was military, helping militant groups like ISIS and the more secular Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia JRTN recruit from and curry favor with the Sunni minority.
This map shows the state of play in Syria's civil war, which after three years of fighting has divided between government forces red , the anti-government rebels who began as pro-democracy protestors green , Kurdish rebels yellow , and the Islamist extremist fighters who have been moving in over the last two years blue. Areas under government control tend to overlap with religious minorities, whereas both kinds of rebels are mostly from the Sunni Muslim majority.
This is crucal for understanding the Iraq crisis because ISIS spent a year fighting and winning territory in Syria before it opened its offensive in Iraq. ISIS fighters have been in many cases fighting with and overpowering the more moderate rebels. This has happened in part because extremists have received funding from Gulf countries, in part because they are better at attracting foreign fighters, and in part because Syria's government has refused to target ISIS, correctly believing that foreign powers like the US may hate Assad but would ultimately prefer him to ISIS.
All of that helped give ISIS a staging ground, territory, and battlefield training for its assault now. The red-shaded areas across Syria and Iraq show the widest extent of what could be considered territory under ISIS control.
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