PERSIAN GULF WAR

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion and occupation of neighbouring
Kuwait in early August 1990. Alarmed by these actions, fellow Arab powers such
as Saudi Arabia and Egypt called on the United States and other Western nations
to intervene. Hussein defied United Nations Security Council demands to withdraw
from Kuwait by mid-January 1991, and the Persian Gulf War began with a massive
U.S.-led air offensive known as Operation Desert Storm. After 42 days of relentless
attacks by the allied coalition in the air and on the ground, U.S. President George
H.W. Bush declared a cease-fire on February 28; by that time, most Iraqi forces in
Kuwait had either surrendered or fled. Though the Persian Gulf War was initially
considered an unqualified success for the international coalition, simmering
conflict in the troubled region led to a second Gulf War – known as the Iraq War –
that began in 2003.

BACKGROUND OF THE PERSIAN GULF WAR

Though the long-running war between Iran and Iraq had ended in a United
Nations-brokered ceasefire in August 1988, by mid-1990 the two states had yet to
begin negotiating a permanent peace treaty. When their foreign ministers met in

1
Geneva that July, prospects for peace suddenly seemed bright, as it appeared that
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was prepared to dissolve that conflict and return
territory that his forces had long occupied. Two weeks later, however, Hussein
delivered a speech in which he accused neighbouring nation Kuwait of siphoning
crude oil from the Ar-Rumaylah oil fields located along their common border. He
insisted that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and cancel out $30 billion of Iraq’s foreign
debt, and accused them of conspiring to keep oil prices low in an effort to pander
to Western oil-buying nations.

Did You Know?

In justifying his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Saddam Hussein claimed it
was an artificial state carved out of the Iraqi coast by Western colonialists; in
fact, Kuwait had been internationally recognized as a separate entity before
Iraq itself was created by Britain under a League of Nations mandate after
World War I.

In addition to Hussein’s incendiary speech, Iraq had begun amassing troops on

Kuwait’s border. Alarmed by these actions, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt
initiated negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait in an effort to avoid intervention
by the United States or other powers from outside the Gulf region. Hussein broke
off the negotiations after only two hours, and on August 2, 1990 ordered the
invasion of Kuwait. Hussein’s assumption that his fellow Arab states would stand
by in the face of his invasion of Kuwait, and not call in outside help to stop it, proved
2
to be a miscalculation. Two-thirds of the 21 members of the Arab League
condemned Iraq’s act of aggression, and Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, along with
Kuwait’s government-in-exile, turned to the United States and other members of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for support.

IRAQI INVASION OF KUWAIT & ALLIED RESPONSE

U.S. President George H.W. Bush immediately condemned the invasion, as did the
governments of Britain and the Soviet Union. On August 3, the United Nations
Security Council called for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait; three days later, King
Fahd met with U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney to request U.S. military
assistance. On August 8, the day on which the Iraqi government formally annexed
Kuwait–Hussein called it Iraq’s “19th province”–the first U.S. Air Force fighter
planes began arriving in Saudi Arabia as part of a military buildup dubbed
Operation Desert Shield. The planes were accompanied by troops sent by NATO
allies as well as Egypt and several other Arab nations, designed to guard against a
possible Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia.

In Kuwait, Iraq increased its occupation forces to some 300,000 troops. In an effort
to garner support from the Muslim world, Hussein declared a jihad, or holy war,
against the coalition; he also attempted to ally himself with the Palestinian cause
by offering to evacuate Kuwait in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied
territories. When these efforts failed, Hussein concluded a hasty peace with Iran
so as to bring his army up to full strength.

THE GULF WAR BEGINS

On November 29, 1990, the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of “all
necessary means” of force against Iraq if it did not withdraw from Kuwait by the
following January 15. By January, the coalition forces prepared to face off against
Iraq numbered some 750,000, including 540,000 U.S. personnel and smaller forces
from Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
among other nations. Iraq, for its part, had the support of Jordan (another
vulnerable neighbor), Algeria, the Sudan, Yemen, Tunisia and the Palestinian
Liberation Organization (PLO).

3
Early on the morning of January 17, 1991, a massive U.S.-led air offensive hit Iraq’s
air defenses, moving swiftly on to its communications networks, weapons plants,
oil refineries and more. The coalition effort, known as Operation Desert Storm,
benefited from the latest military technology, including Stealth bombers, Cruise
missiles, so-called “Smart” bombs with laser-guidance systems and infrared night-
bombing equipment. The Iraqi air force was either destroyed early on or opted out
of combat under the relentless attack, the objective of which was to win the war
in the air and minimize combat on the ground as much as possible.

WAR ON THE GROUND

By mid-February, the coalition forces had shifted the focus of their air attacks
toward Iraqi ground forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq. A massive allied ground
offensive, Operation Desert Sabre, was launched on February 24, with troops
heading from northeastern Saudi Arabia into Kuwait and southern Iraq. Over the
next four days, coalition forces encircled and defeated the Iraqis and liberated
Kuwait. At the same time, U.S. forces stormed into Iraq some 120 miles west of
Kuwait, attacking Iraq’s armored reserves from the rear. The elite Iraqi Republican
Guard mounted a defense south of Al-Basrah in southeastern Iraq, but most were
defeated by February 27.

With Iraqi resistance nearing collapse, Bush declared a ceasefire on February 28,
ending the Persian Gulf War. According to the peace terms that Hussein
subsequently accepted, Iraq would recognize Kuwait’s sovereignty and get rid of
all its weapons of mass destruction (including nuclear, biological and chemical
weapons). In all, an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 Iraqi forces were killed, in
comparison with only 300 coalition troops.

AFTERMATH OF THE PERSIAN GULF WAR

Though the Gulf War was recognized as a decisive victory for the coalition, Kuwait
and Iraq suffered enormous damage, and Saddam Hussein was not forced from
power. Intended by coalition leaders to be a “limited” war fought at minimum cost,
it would have lingering effects for years to come, both in the Persian Gulf region
and around the world. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Hussein’s forces
brutally suppressed uprisings by Kurds in the north of Iraq and Shi’ites in the south.
The United States-led coalition failed to support the uprisings, afraid that the Iraqi
4
state would be dissolved if they succeeded. In the years that followed, U.S. and
British aircraft continued to patrol skies and mandate a no-fly zone over Iraq, while
Iraqi authorities made every effort to frustrate the carrying out of the peace terms,
especially United Nations weapons inspections. This resulted in a brief resumption
of hostilities in 1998, after which Iraq steadfastly refused to admit weapons
inspectors. In addition, Iraqi force regularly exchanged fire with U.S. and British
aircraft over the no-fly zone.

In 2002, the United States (now led by President George W. Bush, son of the former
president) sponsored a new U.N. resolution calling for the return of weapons
inspectors to Iraq; U.N. inspectors re-entered Iraq that November. Amid
differences between Security Council member states over how well Iraq had
complied with those inspections, the United States and Britain began amassing
forces on Iraq’s border. Bush (without further U.N. approval) issued an ultimatum
on March 17, 2003, demanding that Saddam Hussein step down from power and
leave Iraq within 48 hours, under threat of war. Hussein refused, and the second
Persian Gulf War–more generally known as the Iraq War–began three days later.

5
 27 maps that explain the crisis in Iraq
by Zack Beauchamp, Max Fisher and Dylan Matthews on August 8, 2014

The current Iraq crisis began in early June, when the extremist group Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant (ISIS), which already controls parts of Syria, seized much of northern Iraq,
including the major city of Mosul. The conflict has roots in Iraq's complicated history, its
religious and ethnic divisions, and of course in the Iraq War that began with the 2003 US-
led invasion. These 27 maps are a rough guide to today's crisis and the deeper forces behind
it.
Demographics

1.
Michael Izady / Columbia University

6
Iraq's Demographic Divide
Iraq's three-way demographic divide didn't cause the current crisis, but it's a huge part of
it. You can see there are three main groups. The most important are Iraq's Shia Arabs
(Shiiism is a major branch of Islam), who are the country's majority and live mostly in the
south. In the north and west are Sunni Arabs. Baghdad is mixed Sunni and Shia. And in
the far north are ethnic Kurds, who are religiously Sunni, but their ethnicity divides them
from Arab Sunnis. Iraq's government is dominated by the Shia majority and has
underserved Sunni Arabs; the extremist group that has taken over much of the country,
ISIS, is Sunni Arab. Meanwhile, the Kurds, who suffered horrifically under Saddam
Hussein, have exploited the recent crisis to grant themselves greater autonomy.

2.
The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr

Sunni-Shia balance in the Middle East

This map of the region's Sunnis and Shias is crucial for understanding the larger
geopolitics of the Iraq crisis and how its neighbours are responding. Look at the swath of
mostly-Sunni territory in northern Iraq and eastern Syria, both countries that are led by
Shia-dominated governments; a lot of that grey area is under ISIS control. While no one
in the Middle East is happy about ISIS's takeover, the Shia governments are responding
most forcefully, and the crisis is giving common cause to the Shia governments of Syria,
Iraq, and Iran. This could exacerbate already-bad tension between the region's Sunni and
Shia powers, which have been supporting opposing sides in the Syrian civil war.
7
 3.
Arnold Platon

The Kurdish region, in Iraq and beyond

The Kurds — who are long-oppressed minorities in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran — have
been fighting for their own country for more than a century. They've come closest in Iraq,
where, since the 2003 war, the international community has pushed to give them an
unprecedented degree of autonomy. Since the recent crisis began, they've taken even
more de facto autonomy for themselves, and recently seized control of the oil-rich area
around Kirkuk, which is part Arab and part Kurd. The big problem for Kurds is that all of
Iraq's neighbours want to prevent an independent Iraqi Kurdish state, because they fear
their own Kurdish populations will then fight to break off and join them.

Energy-pedia
8
Iraq's enormous oil reserves

Iraq has the fifth largest proven oil reserves of any country, after Venezuela, Saudi Arabia,
Canada, and Iran. Production has gone up since the fall of the Hussein regime; in February
2014, 3.6 million barrels were being pumped a day, while in 2002 about 2 million were
pumped a day. In 1991, following the Gulf War, a mere 305,000 barrels were pumped a
day, gradually picking up as the country recovered from its defeat. The oil is concentrated
in the Shia south and Kurdish north, with Sunni regions to the west notably lacking in oil
wealth. That makes it all the more significant that the Sunni ISIS rebels have targetedthe
country's largest oil refinery and have suggested they plan on seizing much of the
country's northern oil fields; see the map of "ISIS's 2006 plan for Iraq and Syria" below
for more on that.

9
 History of Iraq
Syed M.R. Shabbar
The Battle of Karbala, 680 AD
Sunnis and Shias have gotten along fine for most of Islam's history, but the Syria and Iraq
crises are driving them apart today, and it helps to understand the historical roots of how
Islam split along these two major branches and what it has to do with Iraq. In the 7th
century, soon after the Prophet Mohammed who founded Islam died, there was a dispute
over who should succeed him in ruling the vast Caliphate he'd established. Some wanted
to elect a successor, while some argued power should go by divide birthright to
Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali. The dispute became a civil war, the divide of which began
today's Shia (the Partisans of Ali, or Shi'atu Ali, hence Shia) and Sunni. Ali was killed in the
city of Kufa, in present-day Iraq. 20 years later, his followers traveled with Ali's son
Hussein from Islam's center in Mecca up to Karbala, which is in present-day Iraq, where
they were killed in battle and the war ended. Their pilgrimage is mapped here; it made
Kufa and Karbala, and other locations in southern Iraq, the heartland of Shia Islam.

4.
Arab League

The Safavid Empire at its height

Almost a thousand years after Ali and Hussein's deaths, the Persian Safavid Empire (today
we would call it Iran) expanded to conquer much of eastern Iraq. This is still a source of
distrust between the Arabs of Iraq and the Persians of Iran, and reinforces a belief that
the much-larger Iran seeks to conquer or control Iraq. This is important for remembering
that Iraqi Shia might share a religion with Iranians, but they're still wary of Iran. But it's
an even bigger issue for Iraqi Sunnis, who sometimes believe that Iraqi Shia are secret

10
 pawns of Iran and will refer to Iraqi Shia as "Safavids." The worse the ISIS crisis gets, the
more Iraq's Shia government turns to Iran for help, and the more that Sunni Iraqis fear a
Shia plot against them.

5.
Financial Times
How the Sykes-Picot agreement carved Iraq's borders

You hear a lot today about this 1916 treaty, in which the UK and French (and Russian)
Empires secretly agreed to divide up the Ottoman Empire's last MidEastern regions
among themselves. Crucially, the borders between the French and British "zones" later
became the borders between Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. Because those later-independent
states had largely arbitrary borders that forced disparate ethnic and religious groups
together, and because those groups are today in conflict with one another, Sykes-Picot is
often cited as a cause of warfare and violence and extremism in the Middle East. Scholars
are still debating this theory, which may be too simple to be true. But the point is that
the vast Arab Sunni community across the Middle East's center was divided in half by the
European-imposed Syria-Iraq border, then lumped in to artificial states with large Shia
communities.

11
6.
Human Rights Watch

Saddam Hussein's Al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds

In 1988, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to kill tens of thousands of Iraqi
Kurds in the country's north. The attacks — which he named the al-Anfal Campaign after an
episode in the Koran — were meant to put down Kurdish rebels who were fighting for autonomy.
Al-Anfal killed in just a few months an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 civilians, although Kurdish
groups say it was closer to 180,000. While the genocide is most infamous for Saddam's use of
chemical weapons, this map also shows the less-known but similarly brutal mass execution sites,
where Kurdish families were slaughtered en masse, and resettlement camps. The US responded
tepidly at the time — it was tilting toward Saddam in his ongoing war against Iran — but Al-Anfal
later became a justification for international action against Iraq, and is a big part of why Iraqi
Kurds were granted autonomy after Saddam was toppled in 2003.

7.
US Army
12
The 1990 Gulf War order of battle
On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait following disputes about oil production, and
installed a puppet regime to run the country. After several months of occupation, a UN-sanctioned
international coalition led by the US used ground and air forces to forces Iraqi forces out. The ground
campaign to push back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was surprisingly short, beginning with the advance
of coalition forces from Saudi Arabia into both Kuwait and Iraq on February 24, 1991. Within days
Iraqi forces were retreating, and on February 28, President George H.W. Bush declared a ceasefire.
The air war, however, began on January 17, and was devoted to destroying the Iraqi air force, anti-
aircraft facilities, command infrastructure, and other military targets. Iraq responded by launching
missile attacks on both Israel and Saudi Arabia; while Israel was not involved in the conflict directly,
Iraq hoped to draw it into armed conflict and convince other Arab states to abandon the coalition.
Israel exercised restraint, however, and the Arab forces remained part of the coalition. On January
29, Iraq attacked the Saudi city of Khafji, but was driven back by Saudi, Qatari, and US military forces
two days later.

The anti-Saddam uprisings of 1991

In March 1991, Saddam Hussein looked vulnerable to many Iraqis after his defeats in the Iran-
Iraq War and in the Gulf War that had ended just weeks earlier. Kurdish rebels in the north and
Shia Islamists in the south rose up in rebellion, among others, to oust Saddam. President Bush,
who had thousands of troops stationed mere miles away, called on Iraqis to rise up. Many Iraqis
believed the rebels would receive US military backing, but the support never came. While the
rebels made large advances at first, particularly in the south, within a few weeks Saddam had
defeated them and slaughtered thousands in reprisal killings. The episode left Iraq's opposition
devastated, ultimately strengthening Saddam's hold. Many Iraqis who had risen up felt betrayed
by the US and by Bush personally. Some American foreign policy officials and scholars also felt
the US should have used the opportunity to push all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam, a
belief they advocated for years and finally carried into the George W. Bush administration a
decade later, providing part of the ideological basis for the 2003 US-led invasion.

8.
CNN

13
 The no-fly zones imposed after the Gulf War
After the Gulf War, the United States, France, and Britain set up "no-fly zones," in which Iraqi aircraft
were forbidden to fly, in the northern tip and south of Iraq. The ostensible purpose of the zones were
to protect the Kurdish and Shia populations from Iraqi air strikes after Saddam's massacres. In
practice, this meant British and American aircraft patrolling Iraqi airspace continuously between the
two Gulf Wars. The Iraqi military would frequently shoot at the international aircraft patrolling the
zones, though they never shot down a manned plane. After Operation Desert Fox in 1998, when the
US bombed Iraq ostensibly as punishment for not complying with UN weapons inspectors, the low-
level conflict over the no-fly zone escalated. Saddam offered a reward to anyone who shot down an
American or British plane, while the Western forces began regularly targeting Iraqi anti-air and other
military emplacements. This all goes to show that the US military never really left Iraq — the no-fly
zone only lifted just before the Coalition invasion began in 2003.

9.
Wikimedia Commons/Ras67

14
Why Saddam drained Iraq's marshes

The marshes in southeastern Iraq weren't just a beautiful ecosystem; their bounty also fed
450,000 people by 1991. But after Shia insurgents began using them as a base to hide from
goverment forces — one Iraqi called them "our Sherwood forest" — Saddam drained the water
out of them. By diverting the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates river, Saddam deprived insurgents
of a sanctuary. He also forced the so-called Marsh Arabs who lived nearby to flee; the poulation
of the largest nearby city fell from 67,000 to 6,000 by 2003. Iraqi engineer Azzam Alwash led a
movement to restore them after Saddam was desposed, but the Draining of the Marshes proves
just how far Saddam was willing to go to more effectively kill his Shia opponents.

Pacific Standard
What sanctions did to Iraq
During the period between the first and second Gulf War, the US and its allies enforced a
containment policy against Iraq, and while military measures like no-fly zones (see above) played
a role, the main mechanism was economic sanctions. UNICEF claimed that about half a million
children died as a result. Then-UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, confronted with that figure,
famously said, "we think the price is worth it." The accuracy of that figure, however, is in some
doubt. Michael Spagat of Royal Holloway College, University of London notes that three out of
four surveys examining the period found no changes in child mortality rates following the Gulf
War. "There were no hundreds of thousands of extra deaths," he concludes. That's hardly a
settled point — Columbia researcher Richard Garfield, for one, put the number of excess child
deaths between 1991 and 2002 at 350,000. But, as the chart shows, this is a point where little is
known with much certainty.

15
 2003 invasion

10.
Female bodybuilder enthusiast and BBC

The Coalition against Iraq, 1990 and 2003

While the United States was the prime contributor of troops to both the first Gulf War and the
second, both were backed by international coalitions contributing troops, humanitarian aid, and
other assistance. In 1991, that coalition was backed by a UN Security Council mandate and
included among its ranks most of Western Europe (notably France and Germany) as well as
several of Iraq's neighbours, like Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia (which was actively threatened
by Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and was itself invaded by Iraq in the course of the war). As you
can see in the above order of battle, French and Arab forces actively participated in the ground
16
attack on Iraq. The 2003 invasion had no such consensus backing it. The UN Security Council
declined to support the mission, with France and Germany opposed, and not a single Middle
Eastern country expressed support. Only four countries — the US, UK, Poland, and Australia
— participated in the initial invasion, and while others assisted in various capacities, it was
nonetheless mostly an American and British operation.

11.
Roke

How the invasion overran Iraq in one month

The invasion was mainly staged from Kuwait, with troops advancing northeast before reaching
Baghdad in the second week of April. The ground advance was supplemented by air strikes,
beginning in Baghdad at the Presidential Palace but escalating in scale as the invasion began in
earnest. About a week into the invasion, the 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into northern
Iraq and joined forces with Kurdish rebels, claiming the city of Kirkuk on April 10; American and
Australian special forces were charged with securing the western portion of the country and
preventing possible SCUD missile launches. Before the invasion, General Tommy Franks claims
that the US, using a double agent, successfully tricked the Iraqi government into believing that
the US would invade through Jordan, catching them off-guard when the actual invasion from
Kuwait began.

17
 12.
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction

How de-Baathification devastated the Iraqi army

As you can see in the chart, the combined forces of the Iraqi army were comparatively minuscule
in 2005 as compared to 2009. Why? In 2003, the US government essentially disbanded the Iraqi
army. The plan was part of a policy called de-Baathification, the purpose of which was to cleanse
the government of any influence from former members of Saddam's Baath Party so the ancien
regime didn't reassert itself after its toppling. The problem with this plan is that a large number
of recently unemployed Iraqi soldiers went and joined insurgent militias, greatly strengthening
the anti-government forces while simultaneously stripping the government of its military
capabilities. The effects of de-Baathification redound to this day: ISIS has become infinitely more
skilled by incorporating skilled Saddam-era officers.

13.
MNF-Iraq
18
 The rise and fall of the Sunni insurgency, 2006-2008
ISIS was formerly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). At its peak level of influence in 2006, AQI
controlled significant chunks of Sunni Iraq, and even set up a quasi-government along harsh
Islamic lines in some of the land it controlled. However, the Sunni population turned on AQI —
partly out of anger with AQI's brutal rule and partly out of political interest. This Anbar
Awakening, named after the province in which it began, resulted in former Sunni insurgents
partnering with the American and Iraqi militaries to uproot AQI. AQI was roundly defeated, and
lost effective control over almost all of its previous domain. The fall of AQI illustrates just how
much ISIS depends on support from Sunni Iraqis. If it angers the population, they can provide
critical intelligence and cooperation that would allow the Iraqi military to crush them.

14.
Joel Wing

Iraqi civilian deaths, 2003-2010

No one suffered more from the Iraq War than Iraqi civilians. The fluctuations in this chart show
the three distinct stages of the war. The first, from 2003 to 2005, was the war between the US-
led invasion force and Iraqi forces, including government forces as well as Islamist and nationalist
insurgents. Civilians in this period were bystanders. In early 2006, however, Iraq's conflict
became what is often described as a civil war, fought among three factions: Sunni insurgents,
including Islamist extremists and former Saddam loyalists; Shia militias, some of them rogue
members of state security forces; and the US-led occupation force. In this period, which lasted
two awful years, civilians were often the target of the violence, with bombings and death squads
seeking to ethnically cleanse Baghdad in particular. While conditions improved significantly after

19
 2008, many fear that the current crisis could reignite the sectarian hatreds and militias of 2006
to 2007.

15.
BBC

The ethnic cleansing of Baghdad

There are few grimmer symbols for the devastation of the Iraq War than what it did to Baghdad's
once-diverse neighborhoods. The map on the left shows the city's religious make-up in 2005.
Mixed neighborhoods, then the norm, are in yellow. The map on right shows what it looked like
by 2007, after two awful years of Sunni-Shia killing: bombings (shown with red dots), death
squads, and militias. Coerced evictions and thousands of deaths effectively cleansed
neighborhoods, to be mostly Shia (blue) or mostly Sunni (red). Since late 2012, the sectarian civil
war has ramped back up, in Baghdad and nationwide.

20
 The Current Crisis

16.
Aaron Zelin

ISIS's 2006 plan for Iraq and Syria

This map is hypothetical, but the fact that it exists at all speaks to ISIS's ambition. Aaron
Zelin, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, found this 2006 map
produced by ISIS, showing the areas it hoped to control and overlapping oil sources. The
correctness of the map aside (there is not actually much oil in this area, despite the little
derrick icons), it shows that the group has been thinking about the economics of its war
and how to self-fund. It currently controls much of this desired territory, and some
reports indicate ISIS has enough some oil production and refinery facilities, a big step
toward being able to fund its own war.

21
17.
Institute for the Study of War

The Sunni protest movement of 2013

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did a lot to assist in ISIS's rise. Since becoming Prime
Minister in 2006, he has centralized a great deal of power in his office, and run the Iraqi
government along Shia sectarian lines. Naturally, this infuriated Sunnis, who organized a
series of protests around the country in 2012. These continued into 2013, and the Maliki

22
 government began to see them as a serious problem. Unable or unwilling to resolve the
protests politically, the Maliki government turned to force. His security forces killed 56
people at protest in the northern town Hawija alone in April 2013. The forcible breakup
of the protest movement convinced some Sunnis that their only solution was military,
helping militant groups like ISIS and the more secular Jaysh Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshbandia
(JRTN) recruit from and curry favor with the Sunni minority.

18.
BBC/SNAP

Syria's Civil War

This map shows the state of play in Syria's civil war, which after three years of fighting has divided
between government forces (red), the anti-government rebels who began as pro-democracy
protestors (green), Kurdish rebels (yellow), and the Islamist extremist fighters who have been
moving in over the last two years (blue). Areas under government control tend to overlap with
religious minorities, whereas both kinds of rebels are mostly from the Sunni Muslim majority.
This is crucal for understanding the Iraq crisis because ISIS spent a year fighting and winning
territory in Syria before it opened its offensive in Iraq. ISIS fighters have been in many cases
fighting with and overpowering the more moderate rebels. This has happened in part because
extremists have received funding from Gulf countries, in part because they are better at
attracting foreign fighters, and in part because Syria's government has refused to target ISIS,
correctly believing that foreign powers like the US may hate Assad but would ultimately prefer
him to ISIS. All of that helped give ISIS a staging ground, territory, and battlefield training for its
assault now.
23
19.
Economist

Where ISIS has control in Iraq and Syria

The red-shaded areas across Syria and Iraq show the widest extent of what could be
considered territory under ISIS control. In many cases, ISIS does not directly govern the
territory so much as that they have expelled government forces; in some places it's more
contested than controlled by any one side; and in others, such as the large Iraqi city of
Mosul, ISIS appears to have handed control over to local Sunni groups. So this is not quite
an ISIS mini-state, but it is a vast swath of Sunni Arab territory across two countries that's
held in part by an Islamist group so extreme that they were kicked out of al-Qaeda.

24
20.
Institute for the Study of War

ISIS's war in Iraq as of August 2014

This map shows who controls what in Iraq as of early August. The black dots show ISIS control;
yellow and red are either contested or under threat. The city of Mosul is circled — that's because
ISIS may have seized a huge Iraqi dam there, which could be used to flood large parts of the
country and deprive Iraqis of water. Sinjar is also circled: that's where ISIS militants have expelled
at least ten thousand Yazidis, and ethno-religious minority, sending them fleeing to the top of a
mountain where they are waiting to be killed by ISIS or die of thirst. ISIS has also pushed into
Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, which had previously resisted the group. The Kurdish capital,
Erbil, is where a number of American and other foreign government personnel are based, after
evacuating Baghdad. On August 7, President Obama authorized air strikes to defend both Erbil
and Sinjar from ISIS.

25
21.
Economist

The spike in Iraqi deaths since 2011

Compare this chart to number 18 above, of Iraqi civilian deaths from 2003 to 2010, and you
can see why people are so worried about sectarian civil war returning. This chart of rising
civilian deaths in Iraq since 2011 shows just how bad things have been getting, near or at
wartime levels. But it also shows that this crisis did not begin as suddenly as it may seem to
Americans; there has been rising sectarian violence over the last year and a half, much of it
terrorism by Sunni extremists who have targeted the government and Shia civilians.

26
22.
United Nations

Iraqi civilians displaced by the crisis

By mid-June, the United Nations reported that the fighting in Iraq displaced over 1 million people,
or about 3 percent of the country's population. This is a humanitarian disaster — many of these
people needed to be settled in makeshift refugee camps in areas unaffected by the fighting. It's
also potentially a strategic problem for ISIS. Some experts believe that the mass exodus from
ISIS-controlled areas may be a sign that Sunnis are worried about what life under ISIS would be
like. The more Sunnis are uncomfortable with ISIS' rule, the more ISIS should be afraid — ISIS
cannot hold territory if Sunni civilians begin cooperating with the Iraqi government or
government-aligned militias.

27
23.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

A hypothetical re-drawing of Iraq and Syria

This is an old idea that gets new attention every few years, when violence between Sunnis and
Shias reignites: should the arbitrary borders imposed by European powers be replaced with new
borders along the region's ever-fractious religious divide? The idea is unworkable in reality and
would probably just create new problems. But, in a sense, this is already what the region looks
like. The Iraqi government controls the country's Shia-majority east, but Sunni Islamist extremists
have seized much of western Iraq and eastern Syria. The Shia-dominated Syrian government,
meanwhile, mostly only controls the country's Shia- and Christian-heavy west. The Kurds,
meanwhile, are legally autonomous in Iraq and functionally so in Syria. This map, then, is not so
much just idle speculation anymore; it's something that Iraqis and Syrians are creating
themselves. One of the major questions facing Iraq, perhaps even bigger than the question of
whether it can put down ISIS, is whether the government can overcome these sectarian divisions
and make Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds feel that they are part of the same Iraqi state. Until Iraqis
believe in that project of a diverse, inclusive nation, and until the Iraqi government is able and
willing to see it through, conflict is likely to continue.

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