Baghdad

Overview

Baghdad is the capital of Iraq and one of the principal cities of the Middle East. Founded in 762 by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, it became the Abbasid capital and a center of government, commerce and learning. Its position on the Tigris connected it to the wider river system of Mesopotamia. From its foundation, Baghdad also had a Jewish community. Over time, that community became Iraq’s largest and made the city a leading seat of Jewish communal leadership and Torah study.

Baghdad’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century history reflects Iraq’s upheavals. Its Jews endured the 1941 Farhud pogrom and then departed in large numbers, chiefly during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. The city later served as Saddam Hussein’s seat of power. His regime fell during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after which Baghdad faced looting, unemployment, insurgency and repeated attacks on civilians and state institutions. Since 2014, its security and political authority have also been shaped by the fight against the Islamic State, disputes with Kurdistan, and the strength of Iran-backed armed groups.

Geography

Baghdad stands on both banks of the Tigris in central Iraq. The river and its crossings have long shaped the city’s districts, trade and movement. Early accounts of Jewish Baghdad describe a Jewish Quarter, Dār al-Yahūd, and a western bridge leading toward the Karkh quarter known as Qanṭarat al-Yahūd, or Bridge of the Jews. Baghdad’s location also places it at the center of routes linking Iraq’s southern provinces, the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, and the approaches to the Kurdistan Region.

The capital depends on the wider Tigris basin for water and agriculture. Reduced flows in the Sirwan and Little Zab, tributaries farther north, threaten agriculture and water quality across the basin, including areas near Baghdad. Its size makes events in surrounding districts consequential for the city itself: the rural approaches sometimes called the Baghdad belts have been battlegrounds against the Islamic State and its forerunners since 2003. In 2014, Baghdad had more than seven million residents and a predominantly Shia population. Those conditions, together with the concentration of regular security forces and mobilized militias, distinguished it from Mosul when Islamic State forces advanced across northern and western Iraq.

Ancient and biblical history

Baghdad was founded in 762, long after the biblical periods associated with ancient Mesopotamia. The city therefore has no biblical history as Baghdad. Its setting belongs to the broader landscape in which older centers, including Babylon, had flourished. Al-Mansur established Baghdad as the capital of the Abbasid dynasty, giving the new city a political role that drew officials, scholars, merchants and religious communities from across the region. The name Madīnat al-Salām, meaning City of Peace, was associated with the Abbasid foundation.

Baghdad became a major center of intellectual exchange during the Abbasid period. Scholarship commonly associated with the Islamic Golden Age involved people from several religious and cultural backgrounds. Christian scholars helped transmit Greek and Roman works through translation, while knowledge developed in Christian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and Hindu societies contributed to intellectual life under Abbasid rule. Those contributions do not erase the city’s importance as a center of learning; they describe the varied communities and traditions through which knowledge reached it. Jewish scholars likewise made Baghdad a center of study and correspondence whose influence extended beyond Iraq.

Jewish history

A Jewish community existed in Baghdad from the city’s foundation. It grew into Iraq’s largest and became the seat of the exilarch, a leader of Jewish communal life. During the gaonic period, Jews lived in Dār al-Yahūd. By the end of the ninth century, the renowned academies of Sura and Pumbedita were established in Baghdad, strengthening its place in the study of Jewish law. Until about 1150, Jews in Basra sent religious questions to Baghdad’s yeshivah, particularly to Sherira Gaon and Hai Gaon. Karaites also formed part of the city’s Jewish life.

Jewish leaders and families held influence beyond their own institutions. In the tenth century, the Netira and Aaron families had standing at the royal court and supported the community. The exilarch Daniel ben Ḥasdai enjoyed such prestige that Arabs called him “Our lord, the son of David.” Under Samuel ben Ali ha-Levi, head of the yeshivah from about 1164 to 1194, Torah study reached a high level and the community experienced a peak of prosperity. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Baghdad’s Jews worked as physicians, perfumers, shopkeepers, goldsmiths and moneychangers.

The community’s fortunes changed with the governments that ruled Iraq. Baghdad’s Jews faced oppression under Persian rule during the Ottoman–Safavid struggle and generally received fairer treatment under Ottoman rule, although Ottoman treatment grew harsher in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, Baghdad’s improving economy helped raise Jewish economic standing. In 1917, Ottoman authorities blamed Jews for currency devaluation and subjected community members to extortion, torture and execution. By the 1930s, Baghdad had a prominent Jewish community of about 100,000 people, deeply involved in the city’s commercial and cultural life.

Anti-Jewish incitement intensified before the Second World War. Nazi propaganda reached Iraq through Arabic-language broadcasts from Berlin, and a Baghdad newspaper published an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf in 1933–1934. During the two-day Farhud in June 1941, mobs attacked Jewish civilians and property. A government commission counted at least 240 Jews wounded, 586 Jewish businesses pillaged and 99 Jewish homes burned. Accusations that Jews supported Britain or Zionism served as pretexts for violence against civilians, including women and children. Zionism is the Jewish people’s national movement for self-determination in their historic homeland, the Land of Israel. Baghdad’s Jews rebuilt businesses after the pogrom, but economic recovery did not restore their sense of safety.

The community’s decline accelerated through the loss of citizenship, frozen assets and mass emigration. During Operation Ezra and Nehemiah in 1950–1951, initial flights carrying Iraqi Jews traveled through Cyprus; later flights went directly from Baghdad to Israel’s Lod airport. In 1952, Iraq barred Jewish emigration and publicly hanged two Jews after falsely accusing them of bombing the U.S. Information Agency office in Baghdad. The exodus nearly ended the centuries-long Jewish presence that had made the capital central to the history of the Jews in Iraq.

A 2008 U.S. diplomatic cable described only nine Jews remaining in Baghdad. They concealed their identity because of threats to their safety. Some were too old to leave or feared beginning life in an unfamiliar country; a Christian neighbor helped one woman move around the city and offered her protection for years. Original Iraqi Jewish communal documents remained in a former community center, while Torah scrolls were dispersed around Baghdad. Their condition and location reflected the near disappearance of a community that had lived in the city since its founding.

Modern history

Before the Ottoman collapse, the territory of present-day Iraq was divided among the provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. Baghdad became the capital of the modern Iraqi state and later the center of Saddam Hussein’s government. It also lent its name to the Baghdad Pact, signed in the city by Iraq and Turkey on February 24, 1955, and subsequently joined by Britain, Pakistan and Iran. Under Saddam, the capital housed the institutions through which his regime governed Iraq and directed its wars.

The 2003 U.S.-led invasion brought a decisive change. Saddam’s regime collapsed, ending his rule from Baghdad, but the city faced severe security problems, unemployment and looting during reconstruction. Armed groups exploited the disruption. In 2004, renewed fighting included the organized Mahdi Army militia in Baghdad’s Sadr City. The shift from Sunni Arab rule toward Shia political power and growing Iranian influence also altered Iraq’s regional relationships and alarmed neighboring leaders.

Baghdad’s institutions and civilians became frequent targets. Bombings in Baghdad and Karbala during Ashura on March 2, 2004, killed an estimated 185 Shia worshippers; U.S. Central Command identified hallmarks of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s operations. Al-Qaeda affiliates based in Baghdad moved personnel, money and supplies for his network across Iraq. In 2009, Al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed August suicide bombings at Iraq’s Foreign Affairs and Finance ministries that killed 132 people. Suicide bombings at the Ministry of Justice and Baghdad provincial council on October 25 killed 147; authorities arrested 73 people suspected of involvement or complicity. On February 1, 2010, a suicide bomber killed 41 Shia pilgrims and injured 106 in northern Baghdad as they traveled to Karbala for Arbaeen.

Violence also affected smaller religious communities. Three Sabean-Mandaean goldsmiths were among seven jewelers killed in a coordinated daytime robbery on April 19, 2009. An amendment to Iraq’s Provincial Elections Law on November 3, 2008, reserved one Baghdad seat for Sabean-Mandaeans. These events show both the city’s continuing religious diversity and the insecurity its residents faced after 2003.

Security

The Islamic State posed a direct threat to Baghdad after taking Fallujah in 2014 and capturing Mosul that June. The capital did not fall as Mosul had. Baghdad was far larger, predominantly Shia, and defended by a substantial concentration of regular forces and mobilized militias. It became a hub for their deployment against the Islamic State. Iraqi government tanks and supply columns again traveled from Baghdad toward Kirkuk, opening another front against the organization. The Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), including forces directed by Hadi al-Amiri, also helped protect Samarra. Islamic State attacks nevertheless continued: the organization claimed a July 21, 2015, suicide bombing in Baghdad that killed 20 people. In April 2022, three Islamic State suicide bombers who had arrived from Syria for an operation in Baghdad were arrested in Sulaymaniyah.

Baghdad’s authority over armed groups remains uneven. The PMF is an official Iraqi security institution, and the prime minister is formally its commander-in-chief. Many constituent militias, however, follow the Iranian regime’s chain of command rather than Baghdad’s. PMF leaders including Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis promoted an overland logistics route from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut. Attacks or explosions struck PMF-held bases at Amerli, Camp Ashraf, Saqr and near Balad air base between July 19 and August 20, 2019, amid the wider confrontation involving Iran-backed forces.

Militia activity has challenged both foreign missions and Iraqi authorities. Following September 2018 rocket attacks, the United States suspended operations at its Basra consulate and moved diplomatic staff to Baghdad. Kata’ib Hezbollah participated in the siege of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad after American strikes in December 2019, shortly before al-Muhandis was killed in the assassination of Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad’s airport. Iraqi counterterrorism forces arrested several Kata’ib Hezbollah operatives in late June 2020 amid preparations for rocket attacks on the embassy compound. An American drone strike in Baghdad killed Kata’ib Hezbollah commander Wissam Muhammed Saber on February 7, 2024. Iraqi forces arrested suspects after a further confrontation with the group’s operatives in 2025.

Militias have also threatened domestic political life. On October 5, 2019, Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba’s PMF Brigade 12 joined attacks on Baghdad television offices covering antigovernment protests. The targeted stations included Al-Arabiya, Dijlah, Al-Ghad, NRT, Al-Hadath and TRT. Such attacks, alongside rocket and drone strikes, have tested whether the Iraqi government can protect public institutions and enforce its own security decisions.

Present day

Baghdad’s relationship with Kurdistan remains a central question of Iraqi sovereignty and finance. The capital cut the Kurdistan Regional Government’s share of the national budget as Kurdish oil exports approached, creating a lasting financial crisis. KRG officials reported receiving no money from Baghdad during the July 2014 displacement and security emergency. Baghdad has insisted that Iraq’s national oil marketing company sell Kurdistan’s oil; Erbil has objected. Legal rulings, budget decisions and disputes over salaries and oil exports have prolonged the impasse, while talks on separating sovereign powers offered a route toward a more durable arrangement.

The September 25, 2017, independence referendum gave Kurdistan’s leaders a mandate to seek negotiations with Baghdad: about 93 percent of participating voters supported independence. Baghdad opposed the vote, as did the Iranian regime and Turkey. On October 16–17, Iraqi government forces regained control of oil-rich Kirkuk, held by Kurdish forces since 2014. Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, helped arrange a Peshmerga withdrawal, and Iran-backed PMF units entered with Iraqi troops. The loss of Kirkuk and its oil resources sharply weakened Kurdistan’s path to independence. The referendum established strong support among voters, but it did not itself deliver statehood.

Oil revenue funds an estimated 90 percent of Iraq’s government budget, making Baghdad vulnerable to interruptions in oil sales and dollar flows. A financial arrangement established after the 2003 invasion placed proceeds from Iraqi oil sales in a New York Federal Reserve account. For decades, the United States flew shipments of roughly $400 million to $500 million in physical dollars to Baghdad. In 2026, the U.S. Treasury partially suspended shipments tied to oil exports while pressing the Iraqi government to act against Iran-linked militias. Reduced dollar availability increased pressure on the dinar and complicated imports, including food and fuel.

Iran-backed militias continued drone and rocket attacks on U.S. targets across Iraq, including the embassy in Baghdad, during the War for Iran’s liberation. Militia supporters clashed with Iraqi security forces while trying to reach the embassy in the fortified Green Zone. On July 28, 2026, American and Saudi forces struck Iran-backed militias in Iraq, killing more than 20 militiamen and five Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers. The attacks and Baghdad’s response exposed a persistent conflict between formal Iraqi command and armed factions aligned with Tehran.

Diplomacy continues alongside these pressures. Baghdad, Erbil and Tehran signed a security agreement in September 2023 addressing armed Iranian Kurdish opposition parties based in the Kurdistan Region. Kurdistan’s leaders have also sought Iranian help with their disputes with Baghdad, even as Tehran has pressed them over alleged Israeli activity. Baghdad remains the place where Iraq’s national government, Kurdish leaders, foreign partners and militia networks negotiate or contest decisions over security, territory and revenue.