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Iraq
Republic of Iraq National
name: Al Jumhuriyah al Iraqiyah President: Jalal Talabani (2005) Prime Minister: Nuri al-Maliki
(2006)
Current government officials
Land area: 167,556 sq mi (433,970 sq
km) Population (2008 est.): 28,221,181
(growth rate: 2.5%); birth rate: 30.7/1000; infant mortality rate:
45.4/1000; life expectancy: 69.6; density per sq km: 65
Capital and largest city (2003 est.):
Baghdad, 6,777,300 (metro. area), 5,772,000
(city proper) Largest cities:
Mosul, 1,791,600; Basra, 1,377,000; Irbil, 864,900; Kirkuk,
755,700 Monetary unit: U.S.
dollar
Languages:
Arabic (official), Kurdish (official in Kurdish
regions), Assyrian, Armenian
Ethnicity/race:
Arab 75%–80%, Kurdish 15%–20%,
Turkoman, Assyrian, or other 5%
Religions:
Islam 97% (Shiite 60%–65%, Sunni
32%–37%), Christian or other 3%
National Holiday:
Revolution Day, July 17 Literacy rate: 74% (2003 est.) Economic summary: GDP/PPP (2007 est.):
$100 billion; per capita $3,600. Real growth rate: 5%.
Inflation: 4.7%. Unemployment: 18%–30%. Arable
land: 13%. Agriculture: wheat, barley, rice, vegetables,
dates, cotton; cattle, sheep, poultry. Labor force: 7.4
million; agriculture n.a., industry n.a., services n.a.
Industries: petroleum, chemicals, textiles, leather,
construction materials, food processing, fertilizer, metal
fabrication/processing. Natural resources: petroleum, natural
gas, phosphates, sulfur. Exports: $34.04 billion f.o.b. (2007):
crude oil (83.9%), crude materials excluding fuels (8.0%), food and
live animals (5.0%). Imports: $23.09 billion f.o.b. (2007):
food, medicine, manufactures. Major trading partners: U.S.,
Spain, Italy, Canada, Syria, Turkey, Jordan (2006). Communications: Telephones: main lines in
use: 1.547 million (2005); mobile cellular: 10.9 million (2007).
Radio broadcast stations: after 17 months of unregulated media
growth, there are approximately 80 radio stations on the air inside
Iraq (2004). Television broadcast stations: 21 (2004).
Internet hosts: 3 Internet users: 36,000 (2007). Transportation: Railways: total: 2,272 km
(2006). Highways: total: 45,550 km; paved: 38,399 km; unpaved:
7,151 km (1999). Waterways: 5,279 km (not all navigable); note:
Euphrates River (2,815 km), Tigris River (1,895 km), and Third River
(565 km) are principal waterways (2006). Ports and harbors: Al
Basrah, Khawr az Zubayr, Umm Qasr. Airports: 110 (2007). International disputes: coalition forces
assist Iraqis in monitoring boundary security; Iraq's lack of a
maritime boundary with Iran prompts jurisdiction disputes beyond the
mouth of the Shatt al Arab in the Persian Gulf; Turkey has expressed
concern over the status of Kurds in Iraq.
Major sources and definitions
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Geography
Iraq, a triangle of mountains, desert, and
fertile river valley, is bounded on the east by Iran, on the north by
Turkey, on the west by Syria and Jordan, and on the south by Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait. It is twice the size of Idaho. The country has arid desert
land west of the Euphrates, a broad central valley between the Euphrates
and the Tigris, and mountains in the northeast.
Government
The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein collapsed on
April 9, 2003, after U.S. and British forces invaded the country.
Sovereignty was returned to Iraq on June 28, 2004.
History
From earliest times Iraq was known as
Mesopotamia—the land between the rivers—for it embraces a
large part of the alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
An advanced civilization existed by 4000 B.C. Sometime after 2000 B.C. the land became the center of the ancient
Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Mesopotamia was conquered by Cyrus the
Great of Persia in 538 B.C. and by Alexander in
331 B.C. After an Arab conquest in
637–640, Baghdad became the capital of the ruling caliphate. The
country was cruelly pillaged by the Mongols in 1258, and during the 16th,
17th, and 18th centuries was the object of repeated Turkish-Persian
competition.
Nominal Turkish suzerainty imposed in 1638 was
replaced by direct Turkish rule in 1831. In World War I, Britain occupied
most of Mesopotamia and was given a mandate over the area in 1920. The
British renamed the area Iraq and recognized it as a kingdom in 1922. In
1932, the monarchy achieved full independence. Britain again occupied Iraq
during World War II because of its pro-Axis stance in the initial years of
the war.
Iraq became a charter member of the Arab League
in 1945, and Iraqi troops took part in the Arab invasion of Palestine in
1948.
At age 3, King Faisal II succeeded his father,
Ghazi I, who was killed in an automobile accident in 1939. Faisal and his
uncle, Crown Prince Abdul-Illah, were assassinated in July 1958 in a swift
revolutionary coup that ended the monarchy and brought to power a military
junta headed by Abdul Karem Kassim. Kassim reversed the monarchy's
pro-Western policies, attempted to rectify the economic disparities
between rich and poor, and began to form alliances with Communist
countries.
Kassim was overthrown and killed in a coup
staged on March 8, 1963, by the military and the Baath Socialist Party.
The Baath Party advocated secularism, pan-Arabism, and socialism. The
following year, the new leader, Abdel Salam Arif, consolidated his power
by driving out the Baath Party. He adopted a new constitution in 1964. In
1966, he died in a helicopter crash. His brother, Gen. Abdel Rahman Arif,
assumed the presidency, crushed the opposition, and won an indefinite
extension of his term in 1967.
Arif's regime was ousted in July 1968 by a junta
led by Maj. Gen. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr of the Baath Party. Bakr and his
second-in-command, Saddam Hussein, imposed
authoritarian rule in an effort to end the decades of political
instability that followed World War II. A leading producer of oil in the
world, Iraq used its oil revenues to develop one of the strongest military
forces in the region.
On July 16, 1979, President Bakr was succeeded
by Saddam Hussein, whose regime steadily developed an international
reputation for repression, human rights abuses, and terrorism.
A long-standing territorial dispute over control
of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran broke into full-scale
war on Sept. 20, 1980, when Iraq invaded western Iran. The eight-year war
cost the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people and finally ended in a
UN-brokered cease-fire in 1988. Poison gas was used by both Iran and
Iraq.
In July 1990, President Hussein asserted
spurious territorial claims on Kuwaiti land. A mediation attempt by Arab
leaders failed, and on Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait and set
up a puppet government. The UN unsuccessfully imposed trade sanctions
against Iraq to pressure it to withdraw. On Jan. 18, 1991, UN forces,
under the leadership of U.S. general Norman Schwarzkopf, launched the Gulf
War (Operation Desert Storm), liberating Kuwait in less than a week.
The war did little to dwarf Iraq's resilient
dictator. Rebellions by both Shiites and Kurds, encouraged by the U.S.,
were brutally crushed. In 1991, the UN set up a northern no-fly zone to
protect Iraq's Kurdish population; in 1992 a southern no-fly zone was
established as a buffer between Iraq and Kuwait and to protect
Shiites.
The UN Security Council imposed sanctions
beginning in 1990 that barred Iraq from selling oil except in exchange for
food and medicine. The sanctions against Iraq failed to crush its leader
but caused catastrophic suffering among its people—the country's
infrastructure was in ruins, and disease, malnutrition, and the infant
mortality rate skyrocketed.
The UN weapons inspections team mandated to
ascertain that Iraq had destroyed all its nuclear, chemical, biological,
and ballistic arms after the war was continually thwarted by Saddam
Hussein. In Nov. 1997, he expelled the American members of the UN
inspections team, a standoff that stretched on until Feb. 1998. But in
Aug. 1998, Hussein again put a halt to the inspections. On Dec. 16, the
United States and Britain began Operation Desert Fox, four days of
intensive air strikes. From then on, the U.S. and Britain conducted
hundreds of air strikes on Iraqi targets within the no-fly zones. The
sustained low-level warfare continued unabated into 2003.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
President Bush began calling for a “regime change” in Iraq,
describing the nation as part of an “axis of evil.” The
alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction, the thwarting of UN
weapons inspections, Iraq's alleged links to terrorism, and Saddam
Hussein's despotism and human rights abuses were the major reasons cited
for necessitating a preemptive strike against the country. The Arab world
and much of Europe condemned the hawkish and unilateral U.S. stance. The
UK, however, declared its intention to support the U.S. in military
action. On Sept. 12, 2002, Bush addressed the UN, challenging the
organization to swiftly enforce its own resolutions against Iraq, or else
the U.S. would act on its own. On Nov. 8, the UN Security Council
unanimously approved a resolution imposing tough new arms inspections on
Iraq. On Nov. 26, new inspections of Iraq's military holdings began.
The UN's formal report at the end of Jan. 2003
was not promising, with chief weapons inspector Hans Blix lamenting that
“Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even
today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it.” While the Bush
administration felt the report cemented its claim that a military solution
was imperative, several permanent members of the UN Security
Council—France, Russia, and China—urged that the UN inspectors
be given more time to complete their task. Bush and Blair continued to
call for war, insisting that they would go ahead with a “coalition
of the willing,” if not with UN support. All diplomatic efforts
ceased by March 17, when President Bush delivered an ultimatum to Saddam
Hussein to leave the country within 48 hours or face war.
On March 20, the war against Iraq began at 5:30
A.M. Baghdad time (9:30 P.M. EST, March 19) with the launch of Operation
Iraqi Freedom. By April 9, U.S. forces took control of the capital,
signaling the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. Although the war had
been officially declared over on May 1, 2003, Iraq remained enveloped in
violence and chaos. Iraqis began protesting almost immediately against the
delay in self-rule and the absence of a timetable to end the U.S.
occupation. In July, the U.S. administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer,
appointed an Iraqi governing council.
Months of searching for Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction yielded no hard evidence, and both administrations and their
intelligence agencies came under fire. There were also mounting
allegations that the existence of these weapons was exaggerated or
distorted as a pretext to justify the war. In fall 2003, President Bush
recast the rationale for war, no longer citing the danger of weapons of
mass destruction, but instead describing Iraq as “the central
front” in the war against terrorism. A free and democratic Iraq, he
contended, would serve as a model for the rest of the Middle East.
Continued instability in 2003 kept 140,000
American troops (at a cost of $4 billion a month), as well as 11,000
British and 10,000 coalition troops in Iraq. The U.S. launched several
tough military campaigns to subdue Iraqi resistance, which also had the
effect of further alienating the populace. The rising violence prompted
the Bush administration to reverse its Iraq policy in Nov. 2003: the
transfer of power to an interim government would take place in July 2004,
much earlier than originally planned.
After eight months of searching, the U.S.
military captured Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13. The deposed leader was found
hiding in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit and surrendered without a
fight. In Dec. 2006, he was executed by hanging, found guilty of crimes
against humanity for the execution of 148 Shiite men and boys from the
town of Dujail. He was executed before being tried for innumerable other
crimes associated with his rule.
In Jan. 2004, the CIA's chief weapons inspector,
David Kay, stated that U.S. intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction “was almost all wrong.” When the final report on
the existence of these weapons in Iraq was issued in Oct. 2004, Kay's
successor, Charles Duelfer, confirmed that there was no evidence of an
Iraqi weapons production program.
The turmoil and violence in Iraq increased
throughout 2004. Civilians, Iraqi security forces, foreign workers, and
coalition soldiers were subject to suicide bombings, kidnappings, and
beheadings . By April, a number of separate uprisings had spread
throughout the Sunni triangle and in the Shiite-dominated south. In
September alone there were 2,300 attacks by insurgents. In October, U.S.
officials estimated there were between 8,000 and 12,000 hard-core
insurgents and more than 20,000 “active sympathizers.” Loosely
divided into Baathists, nationalists, and Islamists, all but about 1,000
were thought to be indigenous fighters.
Reconstruction efforts, hampered by bureaucracy
and security concerns, had also fallen far short of U.S. expectations: by
September, just 6% ($1 billion) of the reconstruction money approved by
the U.S. Congress in 2003 had in fact been used. Electricity and clean
water were below prewar levels, and half of Iraq's employable population
was still without work. In April, the U.S. reversed its policy of banning
Baath Party officials from positions of responsibility—the U.S. had
fired all high-ranking members and disbanded the Iraqi army, affecting
about 400,000 positions, depleting Iraq of its skilled workforce, and
further embittering the Sunni population.
In late April, the physical and sexual abuse and
humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad came to
light when photographs were released by the U.S. media. The images sparked
outrage around the world. In August, the Schlesinger report's
investigation into Abu Ghraib (the furthest reaching of many
Pentagon-sponsored reports on the subject) called the prisoner abuse acts
of “brutality and purposeless sadism,” rejected the idea that
the abuse was simply the work of a few aberrant soldiers, and asserted
that there were “fundamental failures throughout all levels of
command, from the soldiers on the ground to Central Command and to the
Pentagon.”
On June 28, 2004, sovereignty was officially
returned to Iraq. Former exile and Iraqi Government Council member Iyad
Allawi became prime minister of the Iraqi interim government, and Ghazi
al-Yawar, a Sunni Muslim, was chosen president.
On July 9, the Senate Intelligence Committee
released a unanimous bipartisan “Report on Pre-War Intelligence on
Iraq,” concluding that “most of the major key judgments”
on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were “either overstated, or
were not supported by, the underlying intelligence report.” The
report also stated that there was no “established formal
relationship” between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The following
week, Britain's Butler report on pre-Iraq intelligence echoed the American
findings.
Iraq's Jan. 30, 2005, elections to select a
275-seat national assembly went ahead as scheduled, and a total of 8.5
million people voted, representing about 58% of eligible Iraqis. A
coalition of Shiites, the United Iraq Alliance, received 48% of the vote,
the Kurdish parties received 26% of the vote, and the Sunnis just
2%—most Sunni leaders had called for a boycott. In April, Jalal
Talabani, a Kurd, became president, and Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a religious
Shiite, prime minister. The elections, however, did not stem the
insurgency, which grew increasingly sectarian during 2005 and
predominantly involved Sunni insurgents targeting Shiite and Kurdish
civilians in suicide bombings. The death toll for Iraqi civilians is
estimated to have reached 30,000 since the start of the war.
By December 2005, more than 2,100 U.S. soldiers
had died in Iraq and more than 15,000 had been wounded. The absence of a
clear strategy for winning the war beyond “staying the course”
caused Americans' support for Bush's handling of the war to plummet. The
U.S. and Iraqi governments agreed that no firm timetable for the
withdrawal of U.S. troops should be set, maintaining that this would
simply encourage the insurgency. Withdrawal would take place as Iraqi
security forces grew strong enough to assume responsibility for the
country's stability. “As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand
down,” Bush stated. But the training of Iraqi security forces went
far more slowly than anticipated. A July 2005 Pentagon report acknowledged
that only “a small number” of Iraqi security forces were
capable of fighting the insurgency without American help.
In Aug. 2005, after three months of fractious
negotiations, Iraqi lawmakers completed a draft constitution that
supported the aims of Shiites and Kurds but was deeply unsatisfactory to
the Sunnis. In October the constitutional referendum narrowly passed,
making way for parliamentary elections on Dec. 15 to select the first
full-term, four-year parliament since Saddam Hussein was overthrown. In
Jan. 2006, election results were announced: the United Iraqi
Alliance—a coalition of Shiite Muslim religious parties that had
dominated the existing government—made a strong showing, but not
strong enough to rule without forming a coalition. It took another four
months of bitter wrangling before a coalition government was finally
formed. Sunni Arab, Kurdish, and secular officials continued to reject the
Shiite coalition's nomination for head of state—interim prime
minister al-Jaafari, a religious Shiite considered a divisive figure
incapable of forming a government of national unity. The deadlock was
finally broken in late April when Nuri al-Maliki, who, like Jaafari,
belonged to the Shiite Dawa Party, was approved as prime minister.
On Feb. 23, Sunni insurgents bombed and
seriously damaged the Shiites' most revered shrine in Iraq, the Askariya
Shrine in Samarra. The bombings ignited ferocious sectarian attacks
between Shiites and Sunnis. More than a thousand people were killed over
several days, and Iraq seemed poised for civil war. Hope in Prime Minister
Maliki's ability to unify the country quickly faded when it became clear
that he would not abandon his political ties with Moktada al-Sadr, the
radical Shiite cleric who led the powerful Madhi militai. Maliki seemed
unwilling or incapable of reining in the rapidly proliferating Shiite
death squads, which have kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of
civilians.
In February, a U.S. Senate report on progress in
Iraq indicated that, despite the U.S. spending $16 billion on
reconstruction, every major area of Iraq's infrastructure was below prewar
levels. Incompetence and fraud characterized numerous projects, and by
April the U.S. special inspector general was pursuing 72 investigations
into corruption by firms involved in reconstruction.
In May a number of news stories broke about a
not-yet-released official military report that U.S. Marines had killed 24
innocent Iraqis “in cold blood” in the city of Haditha the
previous Nov. 19. The alleged massacre, which included women and children,
was said to have been revenge for a bombing that killed a marine. The
marines are also alleged to have covered up the killings. The military did
not launch a criminal investigation until mid-March, four months after the
incident, and two months after TIME magazine had reported the
allegations to the military. Several additional sets of separate
allegations of civilian murders by U.S. troops have also surfaced.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in
Iraq and the most-wanted terrorist in the country, was killed by a U.S.
bomb. Zarqawi was responsible for many of the most brutal and horrific
attacks in Iraq. But his death seemed to have no stabilizing effect on the
country. The UN announced that an average of more than 100 civilians were
killed in Iraq each day. During the first six months of the year, civilian
deaths increased by 77%, reflecting the serious spike in sectarian
violence in the country. The UN also reported that about 1.6 million
Iraqis were internally displaced, and up to 1.8 million refugees have fled
the country.
At the end of July, the U.S. announced it would
move more U.S. troops into Bagdad from other regions of Iraq, in an
attempt to bring security to the country's capital, which had increasingly
been subject to lawlessness, violence, and sectarian strife. But by
October, the military acknowledged that its 12-week-old campaign to
establish security in Baghdad had been unsuccessful.
In September, a classified National Intelligence
Estimate—a consensus view of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies,
signed off by Director of National Intelligence John D.
Negroponte—concluded that the “Iraq war has made the overall
terrorism problem worse.” By this time, many authorities
characterized the conflict as a civil war—as one political scientist
put it, the level of sectarian violence is “so extreme that it far
surpasses most civil wars since 1945.” The White House, however,
continued to reject the term: it would be difficult to justify the role of
American troops in an Iraqi civil war, which would require the U.S. to
take sides.
The increasingly unpopular war and President
Bush's strategy of “staying the course” were believed
responsible for the Republican loss of both Houses of Congress in November
mid-term elections, and for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld immediately thereafter. In December, the bipartisan report by the
Iraq Study Group, led by former secretary of state James Baker and former
Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, concluded that “the situation
in Iraq is grave and deteriorating” and “U.S. forces seem to
be caught in a mission that has no foreseeable end.” The report's 79
recommendations included reaching out diplomatically to Iran and Syria and
having the U.S. military intensify its efforts to train Iraqi troops. The
report heightened the debate over the U.S. role in Iraq, but President
Bush kept his distance from it, indicating that he would wait until Jan.
2007 before announcing a new Iraq strategy. On Dec. 31, 2006, the U.S.
death toll in Iraq reached 3,000, and at least 50,000 Iraqi civilians had
died in the conflict—the UN reported that more than 34,000 Iraqis
were killed from the violence in 2006.
In a January 2007 televised address, President
Bush announced that a "surge" of 20,000 additional troops would be
deployed to Baghdad to try to stem the sectarian fighting. He also said
Iraq had committed to a number of "benchmarks," including increasing troop
presence in Baghdad and passing oil-revenue-sharing and jobs-creation
plans.
An encouraging development occurred in late
February, when the Iraqi cabinet passed a draft law on oil revenues that
called on the government to distribute oil revenues to regions based on
their populations and allowed regions to negotiate contracts with foreign
companies to explore and develop oil fields. Hopes for an oil revenue law
were dashed in September, however, when reports indicated that the
compromise had fallen apart.
In June, three Iraqi army officials, including
Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam Hussein who was known as "Chemical
Ali, were convicted and sentenced to death for carrying out the murder of
about 50,000 Kurds in 1988—what was called the Anfal campaign.
The stability of the Iraqi government further
deteriorated in August, when the Iraqi Consensus Front, the largest Sunni
faction in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's cabinet, resigned, citing the
Shiite-led government's failure to stem violence by militias, follow
through with reforms, and involve Sunnis in decisions on security. August
also saw the deadliest attack of the war. Two pairs of truck bombs
exploded about five miles apart in the remote, northwestern Iraqi towns of
Qahtaniya and Jazeera. At least 500 members of the minority Yazidi
community were killed and hundreds more are wounded.
A National Intelligence Estimate released in
September said the Iraqi government had failed to end sectarian violence
even with the surge of American troops. The report also said, however,
that a withdrawal of troops would "erode security gains achieved thus
far." By September, the level of fatalities in Iraq had decreased, and
President Bush said progress was indeed being made in Iraq, citing the
fact that relative peace and stability had come to the once restless Anbar
Province in large part because several Sunni tribes had allied themselves
with the U.S. in its fight against radical Sunni militants.
In highly anticipated testimony, Gen. David
Petraeus told members of Senate and House committees in September that the
U.S. military needs more time to meet its goals in Iraq. He said the
number of troops in Iraq may be reduced from 20 brigades to 15, or from
160,000 troops to 130,000, beginning in July 2008.
On Septmber, 16, 17 Iraqi civilians, including a
couple and their infant, were killed when employees of private security
company Blackwater USA, which was escorting a diplomatic convoy, fired on
a car that failed to stop at the request of a police officer. The killings
sparked furious protests in Iraq, and Prime Minister Maliki threatened to
evict Blackwater employees from Iraq. In November, FBI investigators
reported that 14 of the 17 shootings were unjustified and the guards were
reckless in their use of deadly force.
Although 2007 culminated as the deadliest year
in Iraq for U.S. soldiers, the U.S. military reported in November that for
several consecutive weeks, the number of car bombs, roadside bombs, mines,
rocket attacks, and other violence had fallen to the lowest level in
nearly two years. In addition, the Iraqi Red Crescent reported that some
25,000 refugees (out of about 1.5 million) who had fled to Syria had
returned to Iraq between September and the beginning of December. However,
many of these returning refugees found their homes occupied by squatters.
In addition, previously diverse neighborhoods had become segregated as a
result of the sectarian violence.
On January 8, 2008, Parliament passed the
Justice and Accountability Law, which allows many Baathists, former
members of Saddam Hussein's party, to resume the government jobs they lost
after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. In addition, many former
Baathists who will not be permitted to return to their positions are
entitled to pensions. The law is the first major benchmark of political
progress reached by the Iraqi government. It was criticized, however, for
being quite vague and confusing, and because of its many loopholes, more
Baathists may be excluded from government posts than those who are granted
employment.
Parliament passed another round of legislation
in February, which included a law that outlines provincial powers, an
election timetable, a 2008 budget, and an amnesty law that will affect
thousands of mostly Sunni Arab prisoners. A divided Iraqi Presidency
Council vetoed the package, however.
In March, about 30,000 Iraqi troops and police,
with air support from the U.S. and British military, attempted to oust
Shiite militias, primarily the Mahdi Army led by radical cleric Moktada
al-Sadr, that control Basra and its lucrative ports in southern Iraq. The
operation failed, and the Mahdi Army maintained control over much of
Basra. Prime Minister Maliki was criticized for poorly planning the
assault. After negotiations with Iraqi officials, al-Sadr ordered his
militia to end military action in exchange for amnesty for his supporters,
the release from prison of his followers who have not been convicted of
crimes, and the government's help in returning to their homes Sadrists who
fled fighting. The compromise was seen as a blow to Maliki. In addition,
more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and police officers either refused to
participate in the operation or deserted their posts.
At a congressional hearing in April, U.S. Gen. David Petraeus advised
against further drawdowns of American troops, citing limited security
gains by Iraqi troops. Petraeus blamed some of the turmoil in Iraq on the
"destructive role Iran has played."
After a boycott of almost a year, the largest Sunni block in Iraq's
government, Tawafiq, announced in April that it would return to the
cabinet of Prime Minister Maliki. Tawafiq's leader, Adnan al-Dulaimi, said
that by passing an amnesty law and launching an assault on Shiite
militias, the government had met enough of its demands to end the boycott.
In July, Parliament approved the nomination of six Sunni members of
Tawafiq to the cabinet.
On Sept. 1, the U.S. transferred to the Iraqi military and police
responsibility for maintaining security in Anbar Province, which was until
recently the cradle of the Sunni insurgency.
For much of 2008, Iraqi lawmakers struggled to pass two pieces of
critical legislation: an election law and a status of forces agreement.
They managed to approve a scaled-down election law in September that calls
for provincial elections to be held in early 2009. Elections, which are
seen as vital to moving Iraqi's rival ethnic groups toward reconciliation,
had originally been scheduled for Oct. 2008. Elections in the disputed
city of Kirkuk, however, are postponed until a separate agreement is
reached by a committee of Kurds, Turkmens, and Arabs. Kurds dominate the
city, but the Turkmens and Arabs have resisted any attempts to dilute
their control through a power-sharing plan.
After nearly a year of negotiations with the U.S., the Iraqi cabinet in
November passed the status of forces agreement, which will govern the U.S.
presence in Iraq through 2011. The terms of the pact include the
withdrawal of all U.S. combat troops by Dec. 31, 2011, and the removal of
U.S. troops from Iraqi cities by the summer of 2009. In addition, the
agreement gives Iraqi officials jurisdiction over serious crimes committed
by off-duty Americans who are off base when the crimes occur. Iraq's
Parliament must also approve the agreement.
See also Encyclopedia: Iraq. U.S. State Dept. Country Notes:
Iraq
See also
Iraq Timeline.
Information Please® Database, © 2008 Pearson
Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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