In November 2002, rumors began to circulate in the United States that the Pentagon was selecting a group of journalists who would go to Iraq following American troops in case of war. The New York Times was one of the first to report the news using a hitherto little known term: embedding. Months later it… Read More »
A few months have passed since the end of the war in Iraq, now a bit of everyone is tearing up their clothes in the face of the (alleged) failure of the American plans. They expected a welcome like Rome June 1944 and, instead, the people, with rare exceptions, immediately made it clear to the… Read More »
March 20 US President George Bush, immediately after Saddam Hussein’s ultimatum expires, announces the start of the Iraqi freedom campaign in a televised speech. The war will be declared victoriously over on May 1st. However, the path to bring Iraq back to political and economic normality and to mend the tears that the Anglo-American unilateral… Read More »
An impossible comparison To those who objected to American friends that democracy does not grow as fast as marijuana, on the contrary it is of very slow development and it takes the seed, a lot of seed, contagion is not enough, invariably the following answer was provided: you have forgotten an important precedent, the Italy.… Read More »
Here’s the thing: Saddam (unfortunately) is a serious person. And this explains, or would explain, many things. In its majority the population hated it, if only because – let’s say starting with the unfortunate invasion of Kuwait – it was tired of suffering deprivation and renunciation, of seeing children die for lack of basic medicines,… Read More »
To the first generation that built the Iraq as modern as an Arab state, a second educated with the English system followed, during the period of the protectorate. It is to this generation that we owe the opening of ῾I. to Western ideas which, combining with local tradition, created interesting literary and figurative experiences. It… Read More »
Arts. – Very little is known about the artistic debate currently taking place in ῾Iraq. The iron government control over every artistic activity (poetic as well as figurative and cinematographic) has seriously sterilized the inspiration and the expressive dialectic, limiting the artistic activity to the rhetorical celebration, tired and repetitive, of the president Ṣaddām Ḥusayn… Read More »
The Iraqi commitment for a privileged understanding with Syria and for a connection with the states of the so-called ” Front of Firmness ”, that is hostile to the agreements between Egypt and Israel, continued successfully until it was outlined (October 1978) a pact with Damascus for a constitutional charter and for common political management… Read More »
From Persian to Ottoman rule First seat of the ancient Sumero-Akkadian civilization, then, from the 6th to the 4th century. BC, Persian province, Iraq it was part of the Seleucid, Arsacids and Sassanid empires and, in the 7th century, was conquered by the Arabs. Under the dynasty of the Umayyad caliphs, residing in Syria, the… Read More »
Rivers of water and oil Two great rivers – the Euphrates to the west, the Tigris with its tributaries to the east, such as the two Zabs and the Diala – cut through the desert: the “land between rivers” (ancient Mesopotamia) was made arable by overflows and 8,000 years of plumbing. Here agriculture, urban civilization,… Read More »
The first Iraqi film screening dates back to 1909 and was carried out at a well-known café in central Baghdad. The event, which was attended by a large audience, achieved considerable success and prompted some local entrepreneurs and businessmen to organize more continuous, less occasional programming. However, another thirty years would have to pass for… Read More »
One of the main elements of the national politics of the post-Saddam era is represented by defense policies. After the fall of the old regime, the country had to face a difficult transition also from a military point of view, linked not only to the defeat suffered in 2003, but also to the dissolution of… Read More »
State of Southwest Asia. The Iraqi population has grown significantly in recent years, despite the climate of constant political uncertainty. In the absence of official data, the estimates show that from 2007 to 2014 Iraqis increased by more than 20%, reaching a population of 34,768,761 in 2014, according to an estimate by UNDESA (United Nations… Read More »
Population. – A 1938 valuation estimated the residents to be 3.7 million; a 1945 census gave 4,611,350 residents Agriculture and livestock. – Further increased the production of dates (30 million palms of which 18 in the Shaṭṭ el-‛Arab, in 1944) which is estimated at about 2.5 million q. per year, on average, of which between… Read More »
Population. – According to the 1947 census, the Iraqi population amounted to 4,816,185 residents, of which about 220,000 are nomads. The last census, held in 1957, announced a total population of 6,538,109; it is estimated that the nomadic tribes amount to about 300,000 individuals. The demographic increase, in the decade considered, was therefore over 2… Read More »
Population. – According to a 1975 estimate, the Iraqi population amounted to 11,124,250 residents, excluding nomads. The annual growth coefficient is quite high (3.3% in the years 1970-74). The residents, 80% Arabs, with strong minorities of Kurds and then Turks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Iranians, are mainly concentrated in the northern regions (between Kirkūk and Mossul) for… Read More »
Population. – According to the 1987 census, the Iraqi population, excluding nomads, amounted to 16,335,199 residents (75% Arabs, 20% Kurds, 3% Persians, 2% Turks), mostly Muslims (mainly Sunni) with various communities Christians (200,000 Catholics), as well as 55,000 Yazidis, 12,000 Mandaeans and 2,500 Jews. In the second half of the 1980s, the annual growth coefficient… Read More »
The Ba’th party and the rise of Saddam Hussein The July 14, 1958 coup d’état that overthrew the Hashimite monarchy represented a pivotal moment in Iraq’s recent history. Since then, the country, having escaped any foreign protection, has transformed itself into a restless and radical link in the chain of Arab states, strongly opposed to… Read More »
The current Iraq includes most of ancient Mesopotamia, which, although it has never been a region with precise political limits, has represented in its orographic borders the site of an exceptional development of various aspects of civilization since the prehistoric age. The hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic documented by the caves in the Kurdistan… Read More »
Seat from ancient times of the ancient Sumero-Akkadian civilization (see Babylon and Assyria), then, from the century. VI to IV a. C., a Persian province, the Mesopotamian territory suffered, under the Seleucid empire, the influence of the Greek civilization, which nevertheless left no deep traces; the resurgence of Persian power with the Parthians and even… Read More »
Agriculture and breeding. Agriculture, which still essentially forms the occupation by far prevalent in Iraq, has remained for centuries in a rather backward condition, mainly due to political instability, bad administration and the abandonment of the ancient irrigation practices that the lower delta had made, in other times, one of the most fertile and most… Read More »
We are still poorly informed about the people of ancient Iraq, because the human skeletons found in the Paleo-Mesopotamian burials and scientifically examined are still few and therefore the only certain and sure basis for delineating, albeit in its elementary features, is lacking. the anthropological composition of the region. We are well informed on the… Read More »
Borders. – In the Iraqi state, the delimitation allowed by the borders isolates, as a whole, a region that presents, compared to the finitime, its own individuality: the particular issues which, within these borders, have disturbed and disturb the existence of young nation do not prevent that, in their general lines, the terms marked by… Read More »
Iraq, a state of the Near East, borders to the East with Iran, to the North with Turkey, to the West with Syria and Jordan, to the South with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and, for a short distance, it overlooks the Persian Gulf. The name, an Arabic adaptation of the Middle Persian Iraq “Persian”, in… Read More »
Iraq, which seemed to have recovered a certain internal stability after years of conflict, has again plunged into a military and political crisis which, inserted in an arc of regional crisis, has come to shatter the very territorial integrity of the state. In the eighties, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, the ‘Land of Two… Read More »
The land between the two rivers When the Romans arrived in Mesopotamia, at the time of the Emperor Trajan (2nd century AD), only the ruins of the cities of Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh and Ur remained to testify to the sites where the oldest urban civilization in the world had begun., where cuneiform writing and the… Read More »
The British, already present in Kuwait since the end of the nineteenth century, had been working for some time to prevent the Germans from entering the region, which threatened to cut off the road to India. The First World War was the occasion for the partition of the territories of the Ottoman Empire. In the… Read More »
A rebellious child, leader of a small gang already in elementary school, a good gun shooter at ten, raised without his father, Saddam does nothing but torment his mother until he takes an uncle with him to Baghdad, an officer purged for being involved in Thirties in one of the various anti-British conspiracies. The uncle… Read More »
The fall of Ṣaddām Ḥusain Ḥusain had managed to stay in power, also thanks to his police apparatus ready to crush all forms of internal dissent, despite the worsening of tensions that crossed the country and the growing rift (in the course of 1995 repeated attempts of coup d’état revealed growing opposition from part of… Read More »
Iraq entered a phase of pronounced instability following the attack unleashed against him by an international coalition led by the United States on March 20, 2003. Officially justified on the basis of the controversial doctrine of preventive war with reference to the need to deprive the regime of Ṣaddām Ḥusayn of the arsenal of chemical… Read More »