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Minorities from the Ninewa plains, including Yezidis, Christians, Turkmen and Shabak, continue to be distrustful of their Arab and Kurdish neighbors whom they accuse of being complicit in violations against them. Minorities' feelings of insecurity are compounded by the lack of infrastructure and basic services in their areas of origin. Even prior to the ISIS advance, many minority villages in the Ninewa plains were neglected in terms of provision of public services, including education.
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This in turn contributed to the marginalization of minorities from the public life of the country, especially minority women, for whom rural patriarchal norms worked in tandem with poor service provision to restrict their access to education. Many minority leaders insist that their communities' future existence in Iraq depends on the emergence of a political arrangement that would provide minorities guarantees of security and self-governance.
In this light, calls for the establishment of a safe zone in northern Iraq have grown more pronounced.
Two weeks later, his mother got a note addressed to him, reading:. Despite wide acknowledgement that violence against women is a serious crisis in Iraq, state authorities have ignored it, and most NGOs have concentrated on "public," political patterns of attacks on men. My sister later told me she may have slipped and mentioned to someone on my mother's side of the family where I was, and then it reached my uncles. The owner let me hide in his shop. They asked for him by name. The writer said Ministry of Interior forces had arrested him:.
This plan, which is supported by several prominent Assyrian Christian, Turkmen and Yezidi leaders, envisions the creation of three new provinces Ninewa Plains, Sinjar and Telafar to act as safe havens for Iraq's minorities, with budgetary allocations from the central government. Other civil society activists campaigned for the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation, which would end legacies of exclusion and marginalization against minorities, but also women, who often suffer from double discrimination on account of their gender and their ethnic or religious identity.
In , ISIS continued the inhuman treatment of hundreds of detainees at a site near Mosul where prisoners were tortured through sexual violence and grotesque executions. In addition, Diwan al-Hisba ISIS's Moral Policing Administration subjected the mostly Sunni populated area under its control to severe restrictions enforced by beating or fines, these included executions of suspected homosexual individuals, stoning of individuals for alleged adultery, banning the use of mobile phones and cigarettes, strict regulations on women's clothing and freedom, confiscations of properties, bank raids, destructions of mosques, shrines, churches, statues, tombs and other religious and archaeological sites for instance, in June , ISIS fighters disrupted the Grand al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul.
These forces use screening processes and official wanted lists in order to arrest ISIS suspects, unfortunately these acts included preventing families fleeing from ISIS-controlled areas to access more secure areas and humanitarian assistance by citing security or affiliation concerns. In particular, local officials have forcibly displaced at least families of suspected ISIS-members in open-air prisons camps in Anbar, Babil, Diyala, Salah al-Din, and Nineveh governorates.
Against this background, thousands ISIS suspects are detained in inhumane conditions that are against the international law standards: prisoners do not have the guarantee to see a judge within 24 hours, to have a lawyer throughout interrogations, to communicate with their families etc. Many of them are forced to confess through the use of torture and when they are prosecuted for alleged support to ISIS, victims' and witnesses' participation in the trials do not take place. Thanks to this law, by February , convicts were released.
Against this background, in , abuses against human rights persisted in Iraq: this country still has one of the highest rates of death executions in the world, death penalty is allowed for different kind of crimes, including convictions of ISIS affiliation. Despite the fact that Iraqi criminal code prohibits the use of death execution against children, Prime Minister al-Abadi stated that judges are deciding whether to sentence to death a German girl for communicating with ISIS.
In addition, women's rights abuses continued, as a matter of fact, while Iraqi criminal code includes punishment against physical assault, women have few legal protections against domestic violence. In September , despite the opposition of the federal Iraqi government and most of the international community, a non-binding referendum on independence in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq took place. The referendum passed and as a response, the federal Iraqi government issued a set of demands including that Kurdish authorities nullify the results of the referendum because of economic interests due to the presence of surrounding military and oil installations in Kirkuk.
In October, Iraqi forces retook parts of the disputed territories which had been under de facto KRG control since Against this background, thousands of Kurdish families were forced to flee their homes. The country has a small coastline along the Persian Gulf, extending approximately 58 kilometers. Iraq's main geographical features include large expanses of desert in the west and southwest, fertile alluvial plains along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and mountainous regions in the north.
With the second largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq's economy is dominated by the petroleum sector. The capital, Baghdad, is located in the center of the country. The area of land extending between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was historically known as Mesopotamia, often referred to as the cradle of civilization for the important developments it spurred in agriculture, writing, mathematics, architecture, law and other fields.
The region fell under the control of successive empires and civilizations over the course of history, including the Assyrian, Babylonian, Greek, Persian, Arab and Ottoman empires.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, the League of Nations carved out Iraq's modern day borders and designated the country a mandate under British control. The British installed Faisal I of the Hashemite dynasty in power, and Iraq became a monarchy, then gaining independence from Britain in The monarchy lasted until 14 July , when it was overthrown by a group of nationalist and anti-imperialist army officers who declared Iraq a republic.
Iraq was characterized by one-party rule under this time period, with high-ranking positions in the public sector reserved for Ba'ath Party members. The Revolutionary Command Council constituted the top decision-making body in the country. In terms of economic policy, the Ba'ath Party nationalized the oil industry, using the profits to build a state welfare system, and undertook a program of agrarian reform under which large plots of land were divided and redistributed to the peasants.
However, the Ba'ath Party stopped short of advocating full socialism, allowing a small private sector and a third mixed sector to operate alongside the public sector. Saddam Hussein faced strong opposition and even armed rebellion against his rule at many points, especially from the Kurds in the north and Shi'a in the south.
Hussein maintained his grip on power through a massive and intricate internal security apparatus, through which he was able to silence his critics, often through brutal means. Hussein also undertook large-scale 'Arabization' campaigns in Northern Iraq that saw ethnic minorities, including Kurds, Yezidis, Assyrians, Shabaks and others, forcibly displaced and their villages destroyed or transformed into Arab villages.
Between and , in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, Hussein carried out the genocidal Anfal campaign against Iraq's Kurds, culminating in a chemical attack on the civilian population of Halabja in Long-standing border disputes with Kuwait, fuelled by disagreements related to debt repayment and oil prices, led Iraq to invade and annex Kuwait in August US involvement also led to the creation of a no-fly zone in Northern Iraq, which provided the Kurds with a degree of safety from Saddam Hussein's armies and allowed them to establish a semi-autonomous zone.
Following Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, sanctions on Iraq remained in place for more than a decade, leading to huge increases in malnutrition, disease and mortality rates among the civilian population. In , the United States and several of its allies invaded Iraq under the pretext that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction and providing support to Al-Qa'eda, accusations that were later proven to be baseless.
Saddam Hussein was captured in December , and later put on trial, sentenced to death and executed. The CPA oversaw the transfer of power to the Interim Iraqi Authority in and then the Government of Iraq following the ratification of a new Constitution and the holding of elections in The US-led overthrow of the Ba'ath Party regime created a security vacuum, prompting a proliferation of insurgent armed groups and the outbreak of sectarian violence. During the worst two years of bloodshed from , more than 55, civilians were killed, according to the NGO Iraq Body Count.
The United States also committed war crimes and human rights violations in Iraq, including, most notoriously, systematic torture and abuse of detainees. The American military presence in Iraq formally ended in December when the last US troops withdrew from the country. Following the US withdrawal, the situation in the country remained unstable. In , Sunnis organized large-scale protests to what they saw as their marginalization under the government led by Nouri Al-Maliki, which were met with violent repression.
Over July and August the group swept across northern Iraq, committing atrocities against ethnic and religious minorities and prompting international intervention in the conflict, primarily through airstrikes. Following the fatwa, thousands of primarily Shi'a Iraqi men signed up as volunteer fighters, leading to the formation of the Popular Mobilization Forces PMF , which played a decisive role in the conflict. The Iraqi Security Forces, together with its allied militias, the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, and international support, launched a series of offensives over and and managed to retake much of the territory formerly controlled by ISIS.
In October , the Iraqi government announced the start of the military assault on Mosul, the last major city still under ISIS control. Iraq is a federal parliamentary republic. The Constitution of Iraq provides a framework for democratic governance and guarantees a broad set of rights and freedoms in line with international human rights law, including recognition of minority rights for some communities.
Executive power is shared by the Prime Minister, who heads the Council of Ministers, and the President, who acts as head of state. Iraq's main legislative body is the member Council of Representatives CoR , the members of which are elected for four-year terms. The CoR includes a 25 per cent quota for women, and eight reserved seats of representatives of the Christian, Yezidi, Sabean-Mandaean and Shabak minorities. The judicial system combines elements of secular and Islamic law. Appointments to ministries and other governing bodies are made according to the ' muhasasa ' principle, an unofficial ethno-sectarian quota system which guarantees representation for Iraq's three largest demographic groups: Sunnis, Shi'a, and Kurds.
Although this system is not required by the Constitution or by law, it is a legacy of the American occupation that has been followed by successive governments ever since. Advertisement Hide. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Front Matter Pages i-xiii. Miqdam Tariq Chaichan, Hussein A. Pages Status of Renewable Energy in Iraq. Solar Photovoltaic Technology Principles. Photovoltaic Experiences in Iraq Neighborhood Countries. Adopted Iraqi Photovoltaic Projects.