27 maps that explain the crisis

in Iraq
by Zack Beauchamp, Max Fisher and Dylan Matthews on August 8, 2014

The current Iraq crisis began in early June, when the extremist group Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), which already controls parts of Syria,
seized much of northern Iraq, including the major city of Mosul. The conflict
has roots in Iraq's complicated history, its religious and ethnic divisions, and
of course in the Iraq War that began with the 2003 US-led invasion. These 27
maps are a rough guide to today's crisis and the deeper forces behind it.

Demographics

1
Iraq's demographic divide


Michael Izady / Columbia University

Iraq's three-way demographic divide didn't cause the current crisis, but it's a huge part of it. You can
see there are three main groups. The most important are Iraq's Shia Arabs (Shiiism is a major branch
of Islam), who are the country's majority and live mostly in the south. In the north and west are Sunni
Arabs. Baghdad is mixed Sunni and Shia. And in the far north are ethnic Kurds, who are religiously
Sunni, but their ethnicity divides them from Arab Sunnis. Iraq's government is dominated by the Shia
majority and has underserved Sunni Arabs; the extremist group that has taken over much of the
country, ISIS, is Sunni Arab. Meanwhile, the Kurds, who suffered horrifically under Saddam Hussein,
have exploited the recent crisis to grant themselves greater autonomy.

2
Sunni-Shia balance in the Middle East

The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr

This map of the region's Sunnis and Shias is crucial for understanding the larger geopolitics of the
Iraq crisis and how its neighbors are responding. Look at the swath of mostly-Sunni territory in
northern Iraq and eastern Syria, both countries that are led by Shia-dominated governments; a lot of
that grey area is under ISIS control. While no one in the Middle East is happy about ISIS's takeover,
the Shia governments are responding most forcefully, and the crisis is giving common cause to the
Shia governments of Syria, Iraq, and Iran. This could exacerbate already-bad tension between the
region's Sunni and Shia powers, which have been supporting opposing sides in the Syrian civil war.

3
The Kurdish region, in Iraq and beyond


Arnold Platon

The Kurds who are long-oppressed minorities in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran have been fighting
for their own country for more than a century. They've come closest in Iraq, where, since the 2003
war, the international community has pushed to give them an unprecedented degree of autonomy.
Since the recent crisis began, they've taken even more de facto autonomy for themselves, and
recently seized control of the oil-rich area around Kirkuk, which is part Arab and part Kurd. The big
problem for Kurds is that all of Iraq's neighbors want to prevent an independent Iraqi Kurdish state,
because they fear their own Kurdish populations will then fight to break off and join them.

4
Iraq's enormous oil reserves


Energy-pedia

Iraq has the fifth largest proven oil reserves of any country, after Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Canada,
and Iran. Production has gone up since the fall of the Hussein regime; in February 2014, 3.6 million
barrels were being pumped a day, while in 2002 about 2 million were pumped a day. In 1991,
following the Gulf War, a mere 305,000 barrels were pumped a day, gradually picking up as the
country recovered from its defeat. The oil is concentrated in the Shia south and Kurdish north, with
Sunni regions to the west notably lacking in oil wealth. That makes it all the more significant that the
Sunni ISIS rebels have targeted the country's largest oil refinery and have suggested they plan on
seizing much of the country's northern oil fields; see the map of "ISIS's 2006 plan for Iraq and Syria"
below for more on that.
 History of Iraq

5
The Battle of Karbala, 680 AD

Syed M.R. Shabbar

Sunnis and Shias have gotten along fine for most of Islam's history, but the Syria and Iraq crises are
driving them apart today, and it helps to understand the historical roots of how Islam split along these
two major branches and what it has to do with Iraq. In the 7th century, soon after the Prophet
Mohammed who founded Islam died, there was a dispute over who should succeed him in ruling the
vast Caliphate he'd established. Some wanted to elect a successor, while some argued power should
go by divide birthright to Mohammed's son-in-law, Ali. The dispute became a civil war, the divide of
which began today's Shia (the Partisans of Ali, or Shi'atu Ali, hence Shia) and Sunni. Ali was killed in
the city of Kufa, in present-day Iraq. 20 years later, his followers traveled with Ali's son Hussein from
Islam's center in Mecca up to Karbala, which is in present-day Iraq, where they were killed in battle
and the war ended. Their pilgrimage is mapped here; it made Kufa and Karbala, and other locations in
southern Iraq, the heartland of Shia Islam.

6
The Safavid Empire at its height

Arab League

Almost a thousand years after Ali and Hussein's deaths, the Persian Safavid Empire (today we would
call it Iran) expanded to conquer much of eastern Iraq. This is still a source of distrust between the
Arabs of Iraq and the Persians of Iran, and reinforces a belief that the much-larger Iran seeks to
conquer or control Iraq. This is important for remembering that Iraqi Shia might share a religion with
Iranians, but they're still wary of Iran. But it's an even bigger issue for Iraqi Sunnis, who sometimes
believe that Iraqi Shia are secret pawns of Iran and will refer to Iraqi Shia as "Safavids." The worse
the ISIS crisis gets, the more Iraq's Shia government turns to Iran for help, and the more that Sunni
Iraqis fear a Shia plot against them.

7
How the Sykes-Picot agreement carved Iraq's borders


Financial Times

You hear a lot today about this 1916 treaty, in which the UK and French (and Russian) Empires
secretly agreed to divide up the Ottoman Empire's last MidEastern regions among themselves.
Crucially, the borders between the French and British "zones" later became the borders between
Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. Because those later-independent states had largely arbitrary borders that
forced disparate ethnic and religious groups together, and because those groups are today in conflict
with one another, Sykes-Picot is often cited as a cause of warfare and violence and extremism in the
Middle East. Scholars are still debating this theory, which may be too simple to be true. But the point
is that the vast Arab Sunni community across the Middle East's center was divided in half by the
European-imposed Syria-Iraq border, then lumped in to artificial states with large Shia communities.

8
Saddam Hussein's Al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds


Human Rights Watch

In 1988, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to kill tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds
in the country's north. The attacks which he named the al-Anfal Campaign after an episode in the
Koran were meant to put down Kurdish rebels who were fighting for autonomy. Al-Anfal killed in
just a few months an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 civilians, although Kurdish groups say it was
closer to 180,000. While the genocide is most infamous for Saddam's use of chemical weapons, this
map also shows the less-known but similarly brutal mass execution sites, where Kurdish families were
slaughtered en masse, and resettlement camps. The US responded tepidly at the time it was tilting
toward Saddam in his ongoing war against Iran but Al-Anfal later became a justification for
international action against Iraq, and is a big part of why Iraqi Kurds were granted autonomy after
Saddam was toppled in 2003.

9
The 1990 Gulf War order of battle


US Army

On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait following disputes about oil production, and
installed a puppet regime to run the country. After several months of occupation, a UN-sanctioned
international coalition led by the US used ground and air forces to forces Iraqi forces out. The ground
campaign to push back the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was surprisingly short, beginning with the advance
of coalition forces from Saudi Arabia into both Kuwait and Iraq on February 24, 1991. Within days
Iraqi forces were retreating, and on February 28, President George H.W. Bush declared a ceasefire.
The air war, however, began on January 17, and was devoted to destroying the Iraqi air force, anti-
aircraft facilities, command infrastructure, and other military targets. Iraq responded by launching
missile attacks on both Israel and Saudi Arabia; while Israel was not involved in the conflict directly,
Iraq hoped to draw it into armed conflict and convince other Arab states to abandon the coalition.
Israel exercised restraint, however, and the Arab forces remained part of the coalition. On January
29, Iraq attacked the Saudi city of Khafji, but was driven back by Saudi, Qatari, and US military forces
two days later.

10
The anti-Saddam uprisings of 1991


Healing Iraq

In March 1991, Saddam Hussein looked vulnerable to many Iraqis after his defeats in the Iran-Iraq
War and in the Gulf War that had ended just weeks earlier. Kurdish rebels in the north and Shia
Islamists in the south rose up in rebellion, among others, to oust Saddam. President Bush, who had
thousands of troops stationed mere miles away, called on Iraqis to rise up. Many Iraqis believed the
rebels would receive US military backing, but the support never came. While the rebels made large
advances at first, particularly in the south, within a few weeks Saddam had defeated them and
slaughtered thousands in reprisal killings. The episode left Iraq's opposition devastated, ultimately
strengthening Saddam's hold. Many Iraqis who had risen up felt betrayed by the US and by Bush
personally. Some American foreign policy officials and scholars also felt the US should have used the
opportunity to push all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam, a belief they advocated for years and
finally carried into the George W. Bush administration a decade later, providing part of the ideological
basis for the 2003 US-led invasion.
 11
The no-fly zones imposed after the Gulf War

CNN

After the Gulf War, the United States, France, and Britain set up "no-fly zones," in which Iraqi aircraft
were forbidden to fly, in the northern tip and south of Iraq. The ostensible purpose of the zones were
to protect the Kurdish and Shia populations from Iraqi air strikes after Saddam's massacres. In
practice, this meant British and American aircraft patrolling Iraqi airspace continuously between the
two Gulf Wars. The Iraqi military would frequently shoot at the international aircraft patrolling the
zones, though they never shot down a manned plane. After Operation Desert Fox in 1998, when the
US bombed Iraq ostensibly as punishment for not complying with UN weapons inspectors, the low-
level conflict over the no-fly zone escalated. Saddam offered a reward to anyone who shot down an
American or British plane, while the Western forces began regularly targeting Iraqi anti-air and other
military emplacements. This all goes to show that the US military never really left Iraq the no-fly
zone only lifted just before the Coalition invasion began in 2003.

12
Why Saddam drained Iraq's marshes

Wikimedia Commons/Ras67

The marshes in southeastern Iraq weren't just a beautiful ecosystem; their bounty also fed 450,000
people by 1991. But after Shia insurgents began using them as a base to hide from goverment forces
 one Iraqi called them "our Sherwood forest" Saddam drained the water out of them. By diverting
the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates river, Saddam deprived insurgents of a sanctuary. He also forced
the so-called Marsh Arabs who lived nearby to flee; the poulation of the largest nearby city fell from
67,000 to 6,000 by 2003. Iraqi engineer Azzam Alwash led a movement to restore them after
Saddam was desposed, but the Draining of the Marshes proves just how far Saddam was willing to go
to more effectively kill his Shia opponents.

13
What sanctions did to Iraq

Pacific Standard

During the period between the first and second Gulf War, the US and its allies enforced a
containment policy against Iraq, and while military measures like no-fly zones (see above) played a
role, the main mechanism was economic sanctions. UNICEF claimed that about half a million children
died as a result. Then-UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, confronted with that figure, famously said,
"we think the price is worth it." The accuracy of that figure, however, is in some doubt. Michael
Spagat of Royal Holloway College, University of London notes that three out of four surveys
examining the period found no changes in child mortality rates following the Gulf War. "There were no
hundreds of thousands of extra deaths," he concludes. That's hardly a settled point Columbia
researcher Richard Garfield, for one, put the number of excess child deaths between 1991 and 2002
at 350,000. But, as the chart shows, this is a point where little is known with much certainty.

2003 invasion

14
The coalition against Iraq, 1990 and 2003


Female bodybuilder enthusiast and BBC

While the United States was the prime contributor of troops to both the first Gulf War and the
second, both were backed by international coalitions contributing troops, humanitarian aid, and other
assistance. In 1991, that coalition was backed by a UN Security Council mandate and included among
its ranks most of Western Europe (notably France and Germany) as well as several of Iraq's
neighbors, like Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia (which was actively threatened by Hussein's invasion of
Kuwait, and was itself invaded by Iraq in the course of the war). As you can see in the above order of
battle, French and Arab forces actively participated in the ground attack on Iraq. The 2003 invasion
had no such consensus backing it. The UN Security Council declined to support the mission, with
France and Germany opposed, and not a single Middle Eastern country expressed support. Only four
countries the US, UK, Poland, and Australia participated in the initial invasion, and while others
assisted in various capacities, it was nonetheless mostly an American and British operation.

15
How the invasion overran Iraq in one month

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Roke

The invasion was mainly staged from Kuwait, with troops advancing northeast before reaching
Baghdad in the second week of April. The ground advance was supplemented by air strikes, beginning