Origins

Iraqis in Canada come from a country of great ethnolinguistic and religious diversity. Centred along the plains of Mesopotamia that are watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Iraq covers nearly 440,000 square kilometres and borders on Syria and Jordan to the west, Turkey in the north, Iran in the east, and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the south.

Of its 18.2 million people, over 75 percent are Arabs who live mostly in the central and southern regions. The rest consist of Kurds, Assyrians, and Yazidis in the northern mountainous region, Turks and Turkmens in the centre and northeast, and Persians along the eastern border with Iran. Although Arabic is the state language spoken by most Iraqis, Kurdish, Assyrian, Turkmen, and Yazidi (a Kurdish dialect) dominate among those groups.

Religious affiliation cuts across ethnic and linguistic lines. Muslims comprise 90 percent of Iraq’s population and are represented by the two major branches of that faith. The Shiites, whose numbers have increased substantially only in the twentieth century, today account for about half of Iraq’s total population and about 70 percent of its Arabs. The Sunnis include the remainder of the Arabs as well as Kurds, Turkmen, Turks, Persians, and Yazidis. Various Christian groups represent about 10 percent of Iraq’s population and include the Assyrian Nestorians and Chaldeans. Jews, who in earlier times comprised about 2 percent of the population, have been reduced by emigration since 1948 to a few thousand living mostly in the capital of Baghdad. Several of the above ethnic and religious groups have found their way to Canada. (See also ARABS; ASSYRIANS; KURDS.)

Although Iraq was formed as a nation-state only in the early twentieth century, it has a long history going back over five thousand years. Iraqis are well aware that it was in the rich valleys of Mesopotamia along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that the first sedentary civilization known as Sumeria came into being around 3000 B.C.E. For the next three millennia Iraqi lands were at the heart of or were part of several empires and civilizations known to history as the Akkadian, Babylonian, Kassite, Assyrian, and Sassanid. It was the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century, however, that was to have the most long-lasting impact.

In the 630s Iraq became part of the Arabic Muslim world which within a few decades, under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, encompassed the entire Middle East and lands as far east as the borders of India and westward across northern African to the Iberian peninsula of Europe. It was during this early development of the Arab caliphate that Iraq became the scene of an event that was to divide the Islamic world. After the death in 661 of the fourth caliph, Ali, who was the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, the leaders of the Umayyad dynasty claimed they were the rightful successors of the Prophet. Ali’s son, Hussein, fled to Iraq and led an unsuccessful revolt against the Umayyads that ended in his assassination in 680. Hussein’s death initiated a religious schism in Islam that lasts to this day between the Shiites (followers of Ali) and the Sunnis, or Orthodox Muslims, who recognize the first four caliphs (successors to the Prophet Muhammad) but attribute no special role to Ali.

The legitimacy of the Umayyad dynasty was continually challenged until its collapse in 747. It was succeeded by the Abbasid dynasty, the so-called “golden age of Islam,” which lasted for over five centuries (750– 1258) and was centred on Baghdad, the present-day capital of Iraq. The economic and cultural wealth that characterized Muslim society on Iraqi lands came to an end with the invasion of the Mongols in 1258. For nearly three centuries the region experienced political instability and further invasions. In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire annexed Iraqi territory and ruled it uninterruptedly until the end of World War I. Ottoman rule sustained the already existing cleavages within Iraqi society between the Sunni and Shiite Muslims, the urban and rural populations, and the Arabs and Kurds.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the victorious Allies established in 1920 the kingdom of Iraq as a League of Nations mandate under the authority of Great Britain. The new kingdom gained its full independence in 1932. While still a mandate, Iraq was plagued by border disputes with Turkey and Saudi Arabia and, in particular, by an armed struggle with the Kurds, who still hoped to create their own independent state which they had been promised at the conclusion of World War I.

In 1958 Iraq experienced a bloody revolution that toppled the monarchy. Since that time, Iraq has been a republic in which the army has often played a decisive role in political decision making. A military coup in 1968 brought to prominence Saddam Hussein, who gained full reins of power in 1979. As head of the ruling Iraqi Baath party, Hussein was proclaimed president for life in 1990.

Under Hussein, Iraq has witnessed an enormous increase in population and enjoyed a degree of economic growth helped most especially by revenues from the export of oil. At the same time, the country has suffered years of war and internal repression of all political dissent. During the 1970s, the Kurds stepped up their military campaign for self-rule. Between 1980 and 1988, Iraq carried out a long and inconclusive war with Iran. Then, in 1990, Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, which prompted retaliation by an American-led international armed force that within two weeks virtually annihilated the Iraqi armed forces at the cost of an estimated 100,000 military casualties and 90,000 civilian deaths. Almost immediately, civil war broke out as Shiite Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north revolted against Saddam Hussein’s rule. The ongoing external and internal conflicts since the 1970s have forced tens of thousands of Iraqi citizens, most especially among the minority Kurds and Shiites, to flee the country in search of temporary or permanent refuge.