The Conflict

Iraq has had a difficult history of war and people within Iraq have long been divided by their ethnic and religious differences. These problems were made worse by Saddam Hussein’s leadership.

Since Saddam Hussein became the president of Iraq in 1979, the country has been involved in two wars. The leader of Iran was against Saddam and encouraged Iraqi Shia Muslims to join Iran in a United Islamic Republic. This started an eight year Iran-Iraq war that claimed at least a million lives.

This war made the religious and ethnic problems even worse. The large Kurdish community in the north decided to fight Saddam and lost. In March 1988 chemical bombs were dropped on a Kurdish town where as many as 12,000 people were killed.

In August 1991, Iraq invaded Kuwait as they were arguing over oil. The invasion resulted in the USA and other countries bombing Iraq. Iraq lost after just seven weeks but the bombings destroyed lots of building and transport links and killed thousands of Iraqi soldiers.

After the Gulf War many Kurdish people fled the country and tens of thousands of Shia Muslims, who also rebelled against Saddam, were put in prison, tortured and killed. Rules were also put into place that meant that Iraq had to let the UN search for Weapons of Mass destruction and stopped Iraqi planes flying over communities where Kurdish and Shia people lived in order to protect them from more bombings.

After the Twin Towers in New York were attacked on 9/11, UN weapon inspectors went back into Iraq in 2002 to search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Iraq was accused of having WMD and of failing to cooperate with UN inspections. In 2003, the USA and other countries invaded Iraq, without UN approval, and overthrew Saddam Hussein. He was later convicted of crimes against humanity and executed in 2006.

The conflict moved rapidly into a guerrilla-style war with religious, ethnic and criminal groups targeting US and UK forces. A national election followed in December 2005, however, the government has failed to make Iraq stable and some argue that the country is in a state of civil war as the different ethnic and religious groups can’t agree. Terrorist attacks, rebel violence and fighting means that people continue to suffer and die every day.