Iraq

Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, historically known in the west as Mesopotamia, is a country in West Asia bordered by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, Jordan and Syria, with its capital Baghdad. The fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers fostered the rise of early cities and empires including Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria, and after the Arab conquest of Mesopotamia in the 7th century, Iraq became the metropole of the Abbasid Caliphate with Baghdad as a global cultural and intellectual hub during the Islamic Golden Age. Since independence in 1932 after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Iraq emerged as a Hashemite monarchy after a period under British administration; a 1958 military coup led by Abdul Karim Qasim overthrew the monarchy and established a republic, and the Ba'ath Party took power in 1968 under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and later Saddam Hussein, who presided over war against Iran from 1980 to 1988 and invaded Kuwait in 1990. In 2003 United States-led coalition forces invaded and occupied Iraq, and today Iraq is a federal parliamentary republic considered an emerging middle power.