History Of Iraq Research Articles

الإحتلال البريطاني للعراق دراسة في تطوره السياسي


 يتناول هذا البحث مرحلة مهمة من تاريخ العراق([i]) الحديث، ألا وهي مرحلة الاحتلال البريطاني للعراق منذ 1917م، عندما دخل البريطانيون بغداد بقيادة الجنرال ستانلي مود وأعلنوا احتلالهم للعراق. ويلاحظ ان تاريخ العراق المعاصر يتوافق مع هذا الحدث المؤثر. لذلك فأن فهم هذا الاحتلال ودوافعه وموقف الشعب العراقي منه مهم جداً لفهم التاريخ العراقي في مراحله اللاحقة. ويبين كذلك فهم الآخرين للعراق وشعبه وكيفية تعاملهم معه. وبعد مرور قرن من الزمن على هذا الحدث فأن اعادة دراسته له أهمية خاصة وبصورة عامة وان كان تحدي الاحتلال كبيراً بالنسبة للعراقيين فان الاستجابة لهذا التحدي كان عظيماً حيث أثبت بأنه لايمكن حكم العراقيين بصورة مباشرة. إن البحث الذي قمت بكتابته وبتوفيق من الله عز وجل يبدأ قبل فترة الاحتلال المباشر فقد تناولت في بدايته وقوع العراق في نفوذ الدولة العثمانية وأوضاعه تحت سيطرة العثمانيين وأهمية العراق الستراتيجية وكذلك المعاهدات التي جرت بين الحكومتين العراقية والبريطانية، وأثر ذلك على كردستان الحلم ويختتم البحث بدور المقاومة وإنهاء الاحتلال البريطاني في ثورة العشرين التي كان للكرد نصيب فيها ضمن حركة التحرر الكردية ولا أجزم بأن البحث قد نال مرحلة الكمال، لأن الكمال لله عز وجل وحده ولكن أدعوا أن يكون قد نال رضا الله ومن يقرأه، والله الموفق.
 
 ([i]) هناك آراء كثيرة حول اصل ومعنى العراق: ينظر: سالم الآلوسي، اسماء العراق وبغداد، بيروت، الوراق للنشر، 2013، ص ص9-174.

Sheikh Al-Khaleesi in the book “Faisal I, King of Iraq”

Criticism of historical books is known for its positive and negative critical evaluation of their historical content. It involves analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the book and assessing its historical scholarly quality. In this historical scientific study, we attempted to provide implicit detailed analytical criticism and evaluate the historical text of the book "Faisal I, King of Iraq." We focused on studying, analyzing, and drawing conclusions from the religious authority of the Khaleeji lineage in the city of Kazimiyah and its religious and political impact on modern Iraqi history. Throughout this study, we presented the reader with a brief introduction to the basic information about the book and its author. We analyzed the historical content of the book by rephrasing the author's conclusions and providing comments supported by documents on each conclusion related to the topic of the Khaleeji family leaders, Sheikh Mahdi and his son Sheikh Muhammad Al-Khaleesi. We also considered the author's writing style and evaluated the organization of the book presented for study and its use of references and other methodological aspects¹.
 Contemporary Iraqi history holds significant importance in scientific studies across its political, historical, and social aspects. Recognizing the historical memory of this intellectual heritage and invoking it for successive generations through a rigorous scientific approach is crucial. Our study specifically analyzed the positions of the Khaleeji religious authority in the book "Faisal I, King of Iraq," which comprehensively documents the life of one of the most significant rulers in Iraq's entire history. Faisal I stands out as a prominent figure in the Middle East during a sensitive historical period. His role was pivotal in establishing modern Iraq in 1921. As nations take pride in their national heroes, fighters, and martyrs, the Iraqi memory should always honor the life milestones of Ayatollah Sheikh Muhammad Mahdi Al-Khaleesi (1860-1925), who was a national hero and a fighter. He also served as the highest religious authority during the reign of King Faisal I¹.

Self-determination and State-building: Mosul Before the League of Nations, 1918–1932

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the place of ‘self-determination’ and its conjunct, ‘minorities’ rights,’ as legal languages in the history of Iraq from the British occupation until its League of Nations-supervised independence in 1932. While historians understand the development of the Arab-led mandatory regime and its relationship to international, League-mediated politics, the potential for the politics of ‘self-determination’ to have created radically different geopolitical outcomes, particularly in the northern, heterogeneous province of Mosul, has only recently been acknowledged. Rather than treat self-determination as an analytical category, this article begins from the perspective of the concept’s novelty in the Middle East in 1918. State-building in Iraq through independence, I argue, depended on manipulating the doctrinal slippages between ‘self-determination’ and ‘minorities’ rights’ as much as it did on institutional processes. Through the emergence of the mandatory regime and in two critical League Council decisions – the Mosul territorial arbitration of 1925 and Iraqi independence proceedings in 1932 – the nascent Arab state, the British Empire, and the inhabitants of Mosul contested the meaning of self-determination. Their arguments had far-reaching implications, some unintended, for the shape of inter-war international politics and constitute an important – and earlier – episode in the interplay between decolonisation and the centring of the nation-state in international law in the twentieth century.

Pioneering Architect in the Construction of Post-Colonial Irak

The idea of the nation-state, which usually emerges in post-colonial periods, uses architecture as a tool of representation in Iraq, as in many other examples that have experienced similar processes. These architectural designs are not context-free and independent productions but are shaped in parallel with official historiographies. While the official historiography in post-colonial Iraq defines the pre-twentieth century as colonialist, it establishes a relationship of belonging with the ancient Iraqi history and the independence movements of the colonial process. Therefore, the architectural structures produced in this period are shaped in parallel with such a historiographical perspective. Although not all of them are labelled as national, the architectural structures built in post-colonial Iraq have a wide variety. Among them, the monumental monuments and sculptures designed and built by government decisions in the city squares are the most characteristic examples of the nationalization policy. This article focuses on Iraq’s nation-building process during the colonial and post-colonial periods and will tell the story of the construction of two monuments designed by Rifat Chadirji, considered the most influential architect of this period. Since the analysis cannot be done solely through observation, the diaries of the architect during the aforementioned period and before will also be utilized to record his recollections of the design and construction process. This article concludes that the monuments in Iraq are linked to the politics of the period in which they were built. Each has an ideological symbolic value and has played an essential role in shaping national memory.

Missionary involvement with the Simele massacre in 1933: the end of American sympathy for the Assyrians

ABSTRACT The Simele massacre of 1933 in Iraq, in which over 600 Assyrian Christians lost their lives, is an important part of Assyrian national history and is one of the few well-known events in twentieth-century Iraqi history where Christians are involved. While there was a general outcry in Western Europe and the United States against the Iraqi government following the massacre, the American missionaries present locally of the United Mission in Mesopotamia/Iraq did not support the Assyrians following the massacre despite the generally humanitarian approach of their mission and their support for the Assyrian cause in the early years after the First World War. In this article, I argue that apparent apathy from the side of the missionaries was largely the result of a radical change in thinking about missionary involvement in political debates concerning the future of non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East.

The Past is Never Dead. It's Not Even Past: History and Memory in Iraq Studies

The history of modern Iraq has been marked by violence, oppression, and foreign interventions to a degree that stands out even among other war-torn countries. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, many retrospectives were still dominated by a US-centric navel gazing of the chattering classes inside the beltway, but more Iraqi voices and alternative viewpoints were present in op-eds and articles than a decade earlier. In this spirit this roundtable section reflects on recent Iraqi history and contemporary developments with an eye toward memory politics in the context of transforming governance mechanisms and evolving civil society actors. It builds on a conference held at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg in March 2023 and portrays emerging avenues for research as well as new perspectives on long running debates.

Nation-destroying, emigration and Iraqi nationhood after the 2003 intervention

Abstract While emigration and population displacements have long been a feature of Iraqi history, this article argues that the 2003 Anglo-American intervention in Iraq and its legacy has contributed to the gradual disappearance of many non-Muslim Iraqi minorities from Iraq. Though the legacy of 2003 can be attributed to a confluence of domestic and geopolitical factors, it is argued here that the 2003 intervention set in motion a process of nation-destroying instead of nation-building, as Iraqi nationhood was divided along primordial lines. Caught between competing ethnic and sectarian nationalisms, Iraqi non-Muslim minorities became targets in the quest for territorial gain and political power heralding an unprecedented and steady level of emigration. This has changed the ethnic and religious demographic of Iraq, the identity of the Iraqi nation-state, as well as fragmented Iraq's multiple ethnic and religious nations both inside and outside the country. Indeed, the effects of nation-destroying have also been transported to the diaspora, strengthening communal identities, altering attachments and creating distance between Iraqi communities abroad. This has led to distanced transnational ethnic and religious Iraqi nations in diaspora who must now also contend with assimilation, a loss of culture and language in the absence of physical links to Iraq. The article offers the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of the effects of emigration of Iraq's non-Muslim minorities on Iraqi nationhood within the new Iraqi nation-state. It therefore contributes conceptually and empirically to advancing our understanding of the role of nation-destroying and emigration in nationalizing processes, a neglected area in current migration and nationalism scholarship.

Poetics as a counter archive: Neoclassical Shi‘i poetry and de-sectarianizing knowledge

In this article, I highlight the importance of literary products as an alternative archive. Focusing on Iraqi history in the first two decades of the twentieth century, I suggest that relying on Arabic literature is a useful method of decolonizing knowledge, which allows us to reconstruct, even partially, voices of Iraqis and exposes to us to their creativity and world-views. Some of Iraq’s poets, novelists and writers supported, and were supported by, the State, whose praises they sang in extravagant odes and mediocre novels. Others, however, were dissidents, radicals, anticolonial activists and commentators on social justice and gender equality. Their literary products are thus highly relevant to the late Ottoman period and the early years of the mandate as an archive countering British perceptions of politics at the time.

Economic Development of the Iraqi Gas Sector in Conjunction with the Oil Industry

The relevance of this article is due, on the one hand, to the importance of the oil and gas industry in the development of Iraq and, on the other hand, the inability to enhance the existing capacities of the gas industry due to both serious systemic internal causes and external problems. The objective of this article is to study the prospects of the gas industry in conjunction with the oil industry, and develop a strategy for their development based on the forecasting of future scenarios. In the article, the research methods used included a systematic analysis of economic, social and cultural conditions, considering the history of Iraq, including a review of statistical data and a variety of sources. The article proposes a method for choosing the industry development strategy on the basis of an analytical hierarchy process, based on an algorithm of iterative processes using an analysis of hierarchies. To clarify the actors’ policies and strategic goals and to find the optimal solution, repeated iterations of the choice of strategy have been proposed. The strategies were divided into alternative strategies for future scenarios, which were evaluated in actions as able to achieve the goals by determining the consistency ratio and the consistency index. As a result of the study, we can highlight the analysis of the centralized system of oil and gas resources’ management that has developed in Iraq, which has a complicated “top-down” delegation of decisions and responsibility, with decisions made at the political level and resources distributed from above, which precludes individual industries from performing their functions, and also limits the effective implementation of strategic development priorities. The development factors for the gas industry in Iraq were identified and systematized with a rationale for the direction of the industry’s strategic development. Groups of factors were identified: market-affecting determinants of the development of the gas industry, as well as other considerations that may, to a lesser extent, affect the development of Iraq’s gas industry and the oil and gas complex as a whole. The results, assessing the significance of the actors’ goals, can be taken as a basis for development strategies for the oil and gas industry, to improve the contract system of the gas industry in conjunction with the oil industry.

On the Lives of Modern State Law

Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.

An Emblematic Case in the Kingdom of Iraq: the Jewish Commander in Charge of the Baghdad Arsenal, Yamen Yousef, from Integration in Nation-Building to Exclusion

Abstract This article illustrates aspects of modern Iraqi history, being concerned with the life and career of Yamen Yousef (Yāmēn Yūsif, Hebrew name: Yāmīn Ṣiyyōn [ben] Yōsēf [ben] Nissīm), an officer in the army of the Kingdom of Iraq, who was the commander in charge of the Baghdad Royal Arsenal in the 1930s, and earlier on had been one of the three young officers made to proclaim Iraq’s first king during the coronation ceremony. That up to the late 1930s he was commander in charge of the Baghdad Royal Arsenal is in retrospect surprising (and that late in that decade a false charge was made against him by the far right is unsurprising), in consideration of rising animosity towards his ethno-religious identity. This came to a breaking point when he resigned, thus reverting from the acquired status of a career in the service of the state, to private bourgeoisie: this was happening in the first decade of full independence, when Jewish civil servants were being dismissed in their droves, after having been co-opted into the process of nation-building, owing to their educational qualifications giving them for a while an advantage. This study contributes novel data and facets that enable a fairly novel, and certainly more nuanced view of intercommunal relations in Iraq from late Ottoman times throughout the Hashemite monarchy (and beyond).

Leveraging Secrets: Displaced Archives, Information Asymmetries, and Ba‘thist Chronophagy in Iraq

During ruptures in state power in both 1991 and 2003, varying groups and individuals seized many Iraqi state archival records, with some later taken outside of the country. Different Iraqi groups gathered unprotected archival records, as did US troops in 2003, while other records were destroyed on the ground in Iraq, likely by state employees, to maintain the records' secrets. Would the information in these records be revealed, destroyed, or used by others to leverage power? Using the concept of information asymmetry, this article explores the battle over information held in Iraqi state archival records by tracing the shifting power relations and attempts to write Iraqi history based on the information the records contain. Accordingly, this article takes up the question of scholarly engagement with the displaced records.

Judicial Legislations and the Tribal Claims System in the Royal Period: A Documentary Study

The present research tackles a number of historical facts and incidents with a purely legal dimension in an important stage in the contemporary history of Iraq, especially the era of the British occupation. This resulted in innumerable social, political and legal problems, particularily the judicial legislation problems in Iraq. These legislations included a set of civil laws and in force governmental procedures that will be discussed historically by examining documents issued by the Ministries of Justice and Interior Affairs in the governments of monarchy for the period from 1921-to-1958. The data of the present paper relied on the Iraqi Library and Archives, (hence DKW). The study adopted the narrative historical methodology when investigating the judicial legislations in the royal era from 1921-to-1958. The scale adopted was the contemporary measurement and evaluation in the Iraqi contemporary history. Finally, the results revealed that the history of the penal procedures in the royal era was those multiple attempts to reconcile between the two types of penal procedures that represent the history of the relationship between the individual and the state. Such legislations were set according to the circumstances of each country and to the level of its intellectual, social, political and human development to serve primarily the interests of the British occupation, and fulfill the desires of the influential class in the royal era. Because these legislations and laws were not based on modern scientific theories, many people were wronged, including the judicial authority and legal clerks who complained from their implementation and their continual application on Iraq for all this period.

The Poetics of Adaptation in Frankenstein in Baghdad

During the peak of the sectarian war in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003, there seemed to be an absolute absence of the mind and a great deal of hatred and tension among the people of Baghdad that turned into maddening acts of terrorism, like car bombings and suicide bombers, killing thousands of innocent people. Frankenstein in Baghdad came to be the mouthpiece of that very critical phase in the modern history of Iraq. The abundant acts of killing and bloodshed during 2005 turned into an ugly form of a monster called " Whatsitsname" formed from the fragmented parts of those killed by terrorist acts. The creature bears a clear resemblance to Marry Shelley's monster in her novel Frankenstein. The monster is a loose perpetrator that kills whoever it meets. This study attempts to analyze the writer's poetics of adaptation in the novel and his debt to other literary works.

The Migration of a Form: An Ancient Concept of Justice Resurfaces in the Modern Artwork

The history of Iraq in the twentieth century, and perhaps the Middle East more broadly, is punctuated by an intellectual shift that has, for the most part, escaped the attention of scholars. It might be characterized as a shift from a problem of representation introduced by the rise of left-wing politics, to a problem of experience created by its failure. This shift registers in the work of writers and artists, where the depiction of the social world gave way to an exploration of states of being. The paradigm for that turn inward in modern art was set by the artist Kadhim Haidar, in a series of paintings exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, in 1965, under the title The Epic of the Martyr [Malḥamat al-shahīd]. The paintings reconstructed imagery from the mourning processions that annually commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, al-Husayn. This paper argues that the ritual imagery contains a grammar of experience, forged in the early history of Islam, that linked justice to a state of being, and that the transposition of the imagery into painting activated that grammar in the artwork.

Review on Sects and Religions in History of Iraq

Every tribe in Iraq has (Sunnis ,Sheia , the Yazidis, Turkmen, Armen,…) in its ranks. Every town and city have a mix of communities. My experience of Iraq, and that of all friends and relatives, is that of an amazing mix of coexisting communities, despite successive divide-and-rule regimes. For many centuries Iraq has been able to allow a religious, cultural and ethnic diversity to exist. Marred and disfigured as it undoubtedly has been from time to time by savage sectarian outbursts it has managed to stand the test of time. And now in a matter of months it is being swept away probably forever in an unimaginably brutal way. This is not only a terrible tragedy for each of those involved it is an historic tragedy for the world as yet another part of the finely woven tapestry of human complexity and coexistence is ripped to shreds. It is easier and quicker by far to destroy, and to call for destruction, than it is to build.

The Woman Personality of an Iraqi Novel (Saturn Ladies) Specimen

In this case, I have to emphasize that the novel (Saturn ladies). It’s about people and their city, and this what where the writer and literary literature are interesting people in the city of Baghdad, and focused on women and offered us through narration, different women’s figures, floating their roles in the novel as circumstances are varied Iraqi women realism, we find a strong deal and be a center for an event , and another is an aligned victim , as she pointed to the man without an actual role, as if she want to say that the man in Iraqi women’s life Iraq on the pointed to the margin do not desire from them but because of the circumstance he is absent for several reasons (immigration, prison, death). The research got up at the entrance and the three subjects, we discussed in the first topic the female personality and its dimensions, and we discussed in the second topic the type of female personality, while the third topic was about ways to introduce the personality and we added the research with a conclusion that included the most important results, including :that the writer succeeded in showing clear dimensions of her characters and making a realistic image of Iraqi women through important periods in the history of Iraq, as well as that these personalities were embodied in the image of an educated person conscious of her responsibilities, strong

Between Stuff Happens and Ishtar in Baghdad

كان المسرح ولا يزال أحد الأنواع الأدبية الرائدة في تسجيل وتقديم التاريخ ، ماضيه وحاضره. إنها أداة ووسيلة يستخدمها المثقفون والمسرحيون لتوثيق أحداث الحياة الواقعية ، فضلا عن دوره في الترفيه وإنتاج الأدب الخيالي. كجزء من مهمتها التوعوية ، كانت الدراما بمثابة وسيلة فاعلة في تقديم الحقيقة للجمهور ، وهي حقيقة قد تكون مخفية أو ملتوية من قبل وسائل الإعلام أو النشرات الإخبارية أو الخطب العامة وفقًا لبعض البرامج السياسية.
 بهذا المعنى ، لعب المسرح دورًا كبيرًا في تمثيل الحرب التي قادتها الولايات المتحدة ضد العراق عام 2003. إذ تناولت العديد من المسرحيات الأحداث والمجريات المرتبطة بهذه الحرب. ومن بين هذه المسرحيات ، مسرحية ديفيد هير" الاشياء تحدث" و مسرحية رشا فاضل "عشتار في بغداد".
 بينما يستعرض الكاتب المسرحي البريطاني الأحداث التي أدت إلى شن حرب إئتلافية على العراق في مسرحيته الوثائقية ، تنقل الكاتبة العراقية صورة قاتمة للبلاد في أعقاب تلك الحرب ، تخلط بين صور التاريخ الذهبي الأسطوري للعراق مع صورحديثة للدمار والفوضى ، مع إعطاء الأمل في مستقبل أكثر إشراقا وأكثر سلاما.

Iraq's future status within the Middle East Axis Strategy

The broader middle east has great importance in the American politics, it lays out future strategies for several considerations, the most important economic geography and enormous wealth, and to Iraq within that region , the lion 's share in the future roles of the agenda, and had a new pivotal role by virtue of its strategic position , Iraq is an international centre of gravity and attraction for many strategic, geographic, cultural and religious considerations, the history of Iraq 's witness a lot of variables, that were the result of overlap and complexity of regional and international interests . It is an important figure in the domination and influence of international accounts , and who dominates this country, controlled by international means, and navigational passages transmitted through the great powers funds to paint a picture of the future of their economies . The American vision towards Iraq took a new direction, especially after the events of September 11 , 2001 . The US strategic interests in the broader middle east has not changed much in decades , despite it different methods , adopted a policy depending on the circumstances volatile , it did not need direct domination of the region , but it also wanted no one else to do so . The best way to achieve American goals was to follow the policy of balancing political forces by dividing the region into divided states with close security ties and interests with the United States of America . The US strategy toward the middle east is based on the two pillars , the first : making the most realistic decision and approaching the highest American interests , and second : out of constants whose main purpose is to serve US interests regardless of the interests of the countries of the region . Iraq is the key driver of American strategy in the region in times of peace and war , even in times of negotiation with neighboring countries such as Iran , Iraq's future status is still drawing and planning within the scenes of the world political theater .

The new Basrah Museum: dedicated to the archaeological and historical inheritance of Basrah and Iraq

Located in the Fertile Crescent and at the head of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, the city of Basra is steeped in history. Close to the heart of ancient Mesopotamia, the territory of modern Iraq was occupied variously by Achaemenids and Seleucids, Parthians, Romans and Sassanids, before the arrival of Islam in the early middle ages. In more recent history, the city's strategic position near the Gulf coast has made Basra a site of contestation and conflict. This exposure to so many different cultures and civilisations has contributed to the rich identity of Basra, a wealth of history that demands a cultural museum able to present all of the historical periods together in one place. The original Basra Museum was looted and destroyed in 1991, during the first Gulf War. The destruction and loss of so much of Iraq's history and material culture prompted official collaboration to build a new museum that would represent the city of Basrah and showcase its significance in the history of Iraq. The culmination of an eight-year collaborative project between the Iraq Ministry of Culture, the State Board of Antiquities and the Friends of Basrah Museum, the new museum was opened initially in September 2016. Already established as a cultural landmark in the city, with up to 200 visitors a day and rising, the museum was officially opened on 20 March 2019. The author was fortunate to be present for this event and able to explore the new galleries (Figure 1).