Climate: mostly desert; mild to cool winters with dry, hot, cloudless summers; northernmost regions along Iranian and Turkish borders experience cold winters with occasionally heavy snows
Terrain: mostly broad plains; reedy marshes in southeast; mountains along borders with Iran and Turkey
Ethnic divisions: Arab 75-80%, Kurdish 15-20%, Turkoman, Assyrian or other 5%
Principal languages: Arabic (official), Kurdish (official in Kurdish regions), Assyrian, Armenian
Principal religions: Muslim 97%, (Shiite 60-65%, Sunni 32-37%), Christian or other 3%
Rank of affluence among U.N. members: 77/183
Modern Iraq centers on the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, scene of the Earth's longest and bloodiest historical pageant. Ten thousand years ago the nomads in the hills north of these rivers learned how to domesticate plants and animals. Moving down to the valleys, these Mesopotamian cultures developed astronomy, mathematics, writing, and centralized states that ran big irrigation schemes. Sumeria, Akkad, Babylon, Assyria--the empires violently appeared, violently disappeared.
Islam came in 642, followed by invasions of the Mongols in the 13th century, the Ottomans in the 16th and finally the British, during the first World War. In 1932 Iraq became independent. More years of instability ended in 1968, when Saddam Hussein seized power. He nationalized the oil industry and used the revenues to create a huge army, which invaded Iran in 1980, igniting an eight-year war that caused more than a million deaths.
Next Iraq attacked another neighbor, Kuwait, setting its oilfields ablaze until an international coalition bombed Baghdad and drove the Iraqis back across the border. Despite that defeat and an anti-Iraq trade embargo that remains in force, the government continues to push grandiose engineering projects and quash political dissent. A striking example of both is its plan to drain the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, which will create a million acres of arable land while wiping out rebel hideouts and the Mideast's biggest wetland.
