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This article addresses the question of Iraq's emergence as a state in the context of the First World War with a special focus on the interplay between British imperialism and Shiʿi activism. By the twentieth century, the majority of people who lived in the territory that would become the Iraqi state were Shiʿi Muslims. Largely ignoring the activism of Iraqis, there is a line of thinking in English-language scholarship which suggests that the process of state formation in Iraq was completely driven by British imperialists. Indeed, Britain established a military presence in the Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul during and after the First World War, and the empire was awarded an internationally sanctioned mandate for this territory in 1920. In an effort to decolonize the history of Iraq, this paper argues that the inhabitants of Iraq, especially Shiʿi activists, played a significant role in the formation of the new state. Research for this paper is based on the writings of Shiʿi activists with a special focus on clerical leaders, as well as British government officials. Challenging historical accounts that reflect British imperialist narratives, this paper argues that Shiʿi activists (and British responses to them) significantly influenced the course of state formation in Iraq. This is not to say that Britain was not influential in the creation of Iraq; in fact, British imperialists clearly had the upper hand. However, they did not operate in a vacuum, unaffected by the inhabitants of the Iraqi state that they wished to create. Instead of assuming that British imperialists single-handedly created Iraq or that ethno-sectarian divisions are the natural order in Iraq, this paper suggests that the relationship between Britain and Shiʿism played a critical role in the formation of the Iraqi state. Although many scholars consider Islamic sectarianism and Britain's colonial legacy in Iraq to be at the heart of the country's socio-political system, the relationship between Britain and Shiʿism in Iraq has not received ample scholarly attention. The intersection of British imperialism and Shiʿi activism resulted in several foundational threads that were woven into the fabric of the Iraqi state. The 1920 Shiʿi revolt against the British mandate for Iraq and the British counter-revolt became the outward manifestation of the British-Shiʿi divide. British officials installed a Sunni-run government in Iraq for fear of Shiʿi dominance, which could have resulted from democratic institutions. Anti-British resistance led by Shiʿi clerics completely changed the calculus of Iraq's emergence as an independent state and alienated much of the Shiʿi community from Iraq's political establishment. This process radically altered the roles that Shiʿi and British leaders hoped to play in post-Ottoman Iraq. This state of affairs was not inevitable given that the continuation of British-Shiʿi alliances that began to emerge during the First World War would have produced a profoundly different state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1987–1988 Anfal Campaign during which the Iraqi Baath regime massacred some 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis, 5,000 of whom killed by chemical weapons in the town of Halabja, is considered one of the major traumas in modern Kurdish history. Yet a few decades later, the Kurds appear to have risen from their proverbial ashes, embarking against great odds on an ambitious state building project in northern Iraq. With this story of "trauma and redemption" as background, this paper considers the lessons learned from this Kurdish experiment; lessons drawn not only by the Kurds themselves, but by all those who willy-nilly accompanied them on this journey; the Iraqi state, the international community, and the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities survive the Islamic State (ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah, IS) occupation of Ninewa Governorate? Existing accounts of wartime survival either essentialize social identity or ignore it altogether by reducing survival to cost-benefit calculations or political opportunism. Against the conventional wisdom, this article argues that individuals survive conflict by drawing on repertoires – consisting of practices, tools, organized routines, symbols, and rhetorical strategies – to navigate violent situations. Distinct from deliberate calculations or rational strategies, repertoires are creative, flexible, and often contradictory. The author examines Iraqis' reliance on survival repertoires through a mixed-methods research design of observational data and fieldwork. This study begins by analyzing migration patterns recorded in the United Nation's Displacement Tracking Matrix. To understand how Iraqis who remained survived the conflict, this work draws on original interviews with Iraqi peacebuilders from minority communities. While most minorities fled during the IS offensive of June 2014, those who remained pursued various forms of cooperation, contention, and neutrality. This research finds that those who remained survived the conflict by mobilizing self-defense groups and by their coordination with members of the anti-IS coalition. Opportunistic collaboration with IS insurgents during the initial stages of the occupation was less common. In areas where the Iraqi Security Forces (al-Quwāt al-Maslahah al-ʿIrāqiyya, ISF) or Peshmerga were absent, residents mobilized community militias unaligned from Baghdād or Arbīl. The findings of this research provide insights for scholars and practitioners interested in peacebuilding, transitional justice, and post-conflict reconstruction in fragile states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 1986, a dramatic top-secret meeting of the Baʿth Pan Arab Leadership, the party's highest ideological body, fully recorded by Ṣaddām Ḥussein, took place in wartime Baghdad. This meeting is thrice unique. First, the medium, an unabridged, audio-recording. Second, the topic, the dilemma of many Middle Eastern ruling regimes, vacillating between a secular, or semi-secular ideology and Islamic political expediency. In the case of the Baʿth, a more secular and ideological movement than most, this dilemma is particularly poignant. Third, it is exposing a bitter clash between a brutal dictator, who had executed comrades for opposing him, and three brave lieutenants. On the surface it was convened to discuss a tactical alliance with a sworn enemy, the Muslim Brethren (MB). At a dangerous moment in the Iraq-Iran War, Ṣaddām identified swelling popular religiosity. He hoped that an alliance with the MB would blunt criticism of his regime's secularism. All the same, some participants feared that secular Arabism, the central tenet of Baʿthi faith, was at stake. Unexpectedly, the meeting produced a startling drama. Albeit temporarily, it forced Ṣaddām to take one step back. Other ideologically oriented dictators, such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Ḥāfiẓ al-Assad, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, too, faced ideology-politics dilemmas, yet none of them left such a surprising chronicle. A similar audio recording also comes to mind that offers a rare verbatim meeting of the inner working of a county's highest institution at a moment of crisis – the transcripts of Kennedy's ExComm during the Cuban Missile Crisis. While it deliberated an existential global matter and took place in a democracy, one sees similarities, namely, its detail, the exposure of emotional charges, the ability to speak truth to power, and the benefit resulting from that ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the history of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the largest Shī'ī Islamist organization within the exiled Iraqi opposition movement, as a case study to delineate how the meaning, function, and salience of sectarian identities are affected by political and social changes at the local, regional, and international level. To this end, this work identifies and explains a discursive shift observed in SCIRI's publications produced during its tenure as an Iraqi opposition group. Whereas SCIRI's publications during the Iran-Iraq War emphasized that its brand of Islamic government would represent all Iraqis regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliation, following the war's conclusion the Council strove to portray its leaders as the primary defenders of Shī'ī interests in Iraq and focused near exclusively on the need to protect the rights of Iraq Shī'ī. It argues that several key developments account for the Supreme Council's adoption of a Shī'ī-centric political stance during the 1990s, namely: the internationalization and unification of the Iraqi opposition movement in the aftermath of the 1991 March Uprisings and the post-Cold War environment within which the exiled Iraqi opposition was operating. When considered collectively, beyond demonstrating the contingency and complexity of the advent of Shī'ī identity politics within Iraqi opposition circles throughout the 1990s, these findings suggest the importance of taking into consideration larger, global trends as contributing factors when conceptualizing how subnational forms of identification acquire heighted social and political salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]