Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said his government is also planning to build new irrigation projects, cut flaring from oil drilling, and ramp up clean energy, aiming to draw 30% of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2030.
The U.S. will return more than 17,000 ancient artifacts, including the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, after authorities recently reached a repatriation agreement with Baghdad to return artifacts seized from dealers and museums.
On International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a women’s rights group active in the Kurdistan Region announced that zero cases of GM were reported in the Garmiyan Administration in 2019.
Iraq saw an 80% drop in civilian deaths in the first 5 months of 2018 compared to the same period last year, according to reports by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and the Iraq Body Count database.
Iraq’s 1958 revolution began before dawn on July 14, when tanks rolled into Baghdad and a radio announcer declared the monarchy finished. Within hours, the Free Officers had ended nearly four decades of Hashemite rule. General Qasim’s new republic promised something rare: an Iraq belonging equally to Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, and Yazidis.
Seljuk Empire founders Tughril and Chaghri Beg, two brothers from a nomadic Turkic clan near the Aral Sea, captured Merv and Nishapur in 1037 C.E. and built a state that eventually stretched from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush. Rather than dismantle Persian civilization, they governed through it — a pattern of cultural fusion that echoed across later Islamic empires.
Al-Khwarizmi’s algebra, completed in Baghdad around 820 C.E., gave the world its first textbook treating algebra as a discipline in its own right. Working at the Abbasid House of Wisdom, he classified equations into general types solvable by shared rules. His name survives in the word “algorithm,” his book’s title in “algebra.”
Baghdad was founded on July 30, 762 C.E., when Caliph Al-Mansur broke ground on the western bank of the Tigris and named it the City of Peace. Its famous circular plan was designed by a Zoroastrian and a Jewish scholar. Within a generation, it grew into one of the largest cities on Earth and a crossroads of medieval learning.
In 750 C.E., the Abbasid Caliphate rose to power after toppling the Umayyads at the Battle of the Great Zab River. From their new capital in Baghdad, founded in 762, scholars at the House of Wisdom translated Greek, Persian, and Indian texts and pioneered algebra, optics, and medicine — knowledge that later flowed into European universities.
Babylonian scribes created the earliest known star catalogues around 1200 B.C.E., pressing careful observations of the night sky into clay tablets during the Kassite era. Working in cuneiform, they turned scattered stargazing into organized, written records meant to outlast their authors. It was an early step toward the idea that the cosmos could be studied, shared, and built upon across generations.
