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 Ba'ath Socialist Party. The Ba'ath Party advocated secularism, pan-Arabism, and socialism. The following year, the new leader, Abdel Salam Arif, consolidated his power by driving out the Ba'ath 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 Ba'ath 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. One of the world's leading producers of oil, Iraq's oil revenues were used 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 ceasefire 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 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 Shi'ites 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 Shi'ites.

The UN Security Council imposed sanctions beginning in 1990, which barred Iraq from selling oil except in exchange for food and medicine. The sanctions against Iraq have failed to crush its leader but have caused catastrophic suffering among its people—the country's infrastructure is in ruins, and disease, malnutrition, and the infant mortality rate have 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 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. Foreign and domestic critics expressed skepticism about the Bush administration's allegations and whether military means were the only way to resolve them.

The Bush administration also presented action against Iraq as part of the U.S. war on terrorism, but it repeatedly failed to conclusively link Iraq to al-Qaeda. Critics warned that a focus on Iraq would deflect attention away from the real threat of terrorism and thwart the chance for a resolution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Arab world and much of Europe condemned the U.S. stance. Only the UK declared its intention to support the U.S. in military action. In response to the mounting U.S. threats, Hussein continued to refuse UN weapons inspections and engaged in his characteristic defiant bluster. 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 have no choice but to 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 2002, 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 did not find it conclusive: France, Russia, and China urged that the UN inspectors be given more time to complete its task. U.S. diplomatic relations with France and Germany—both highly critical of what they saw as Bush's rush to war before exhausting the alternatives of inspections and containment—were severely strained. The U.S. began sending troops to the region in early 2003; by March, about 225,000 soldiers were deployed. Britain also sent about 45,000 troops. In a February UN report, Blix indicated that modest progress had been made in Iraq's cooperation. Both pro- and anti-war nations felt the report supported their point of view. Massive, worldwide anti-war demonstrations took place on Feb. 15.

On Feb. 24 2003, the U.S. introduced a draft resolution to the UN proposing an ultimatum to Iraq, one authorizing military action unless Iraq demonstrated by March 17 that it had disarmed. France and Russia, permanent members of the Security Council with veto power, made it clear that they would not support the resolution.

The U.S. and Britain's intense lobbying efforts among the other UN Security Council members yielded only two other supporters, Spain and Bulgaria. George W. Bush, backed by Britain's Tony Blair (who faced increasing pressure from his Labor Party to avoid military action without UN approval), 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 2003, when President Bush delivered an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein to leave the country within 48 hours or else face an attack.

On March 20 2003, the war against Iraq began with the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In the coming days, the U.S. and Britain met greater-than-expected resistance as they attempted to march on Baghdad. But by April 9 2003, U.S. forces took control of Baghdad, signalling the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

On April 14 2003, after taking control of the city of Tikrit, the Pentagon declared that the major fighting of the war was over. Saddam Hussein's whereabouts remained unknown. Post-war reconstruction went far less smoothly than the war itself. The country was enveloped in violence and chaos, and coalition forces continued to meet Iraqi resistance and fighting.

Many essential services, such as electricity and water, have yet to be restored. Within the first month following the war, the U.S. sacked its civil administrator, Gen. Jay Garner, because of his inability to curb the country's lawlessness, and replaced him with a diplomat, Paul Bremer. Iraqis have strongly protested against the delay in self-rule and the absence of a timetable to end the U.S. occupation. In May, the UN Security Council approved a resolution lifting the economic sanctions against Iraq and supporting the U.S.-led administration in Iraq.

In July, Bremer appointed an Iraqi governing council, a first step in turning over power to the Iraqis, though the council has limited power. On Sept. 1 2003, the Iraq Governing Council appointed a 25-member cabinet to begin running the government, a significant step in transferring authority to Iraqis.

Months of searching for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction—one of the prime reasons the Bush and Blair administrations cited for launching to war—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.

Organized guerrilla attacks by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein continued on a daily basis. The U.S. launched several tough military campaigns to subdue the remaining Iraqi resistance, which also had the effect of further alienating the populace. The Pentagon has estimated that the war costs $4 billion a month. 140,000 American and 11,000 British troops remain in Iraq, as well as about 10,000 coalition troops. Given Iraq's continued instability and the small, but steady number of American casualties (by August 2003, more soldiers had died in the aftermath of the war than during the official period of combat), some lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have questioned whether more troops should be deployed. Guerrilla attacks increased in late summer. Several oil pipelines were sabotaged; on Aug. 7 the Jordanian embassy was bombed; and on Aug. 19 a suicide bombing destroyed UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing top UN envoy Sérgio Vieira de Mello and 22 others. Just ten days later, on Aug. 29, a car bomb at a holy shrine in Najaf killed one of Iraq's most important Shi'ite leaders, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, as well as about 80 others, and wounded 125. An attempted assassination of a member of the Iraqi governing council narrowly failed in September. It is unclear who was responsible for these guerrilla-style attacks.

In September 2003, President Bush announced he would ask Congress for $87 billion in additional military and construction spending for Iraq. He also 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 would serve as a model for the rest of the Middle East. In a coolly received speech at the UN in September, Bush asked the international community to provide more troops and money for Iraq, but made it clear that decision-making would remain with the U.S.

In October 2003, the UN Security Council unanimously approved the U.S. and UK resolution on Iraq's reconstruction, which supported an international force in the country under U.S. authority. But it became clear that the unanimous support for U.S.-led reconstruction was largely symbolic. The Madrid Conference, an international donors' conference held a few weeks later, yielded little in troops or money from the international community. Only $13 billion (in addition to the $20 billion already pledged by the United States) was raised.

This amount fell short of the overall target of raising $56 billion, the figure the World Bank and the UN estimated that Iraq needs over the next four years. Organized guerrilla attacks intensified. On Oct. 27 2003, four suicide attacks in Baghdad killed 43 and wounded more than 200. Targets included the headquarters of the Red Crescent (Islamic Red Cross) and three police stations. In the single deadliest strike since the Iraq war began, guerrillas shot down an American helicopter, killing 16 U.S. soldiers and injuring 21 others.

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