Military history of Iraq
[1][2] The area possesses strategic value, initially for the rich, fertile agricultural region in the Mesopotamian plain, and more recently for large petroleum deposits and access to the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
The present territory of Iraq lacks significant strategic barriers, making it difficult to defend against foreign invasion.
A garrison in Mosul rebelled against Qassem, and Kurdish leader Barzani returned from exile in the Soviet Union to suppress them.
[3] The 3rd Armoured Division, the Salah ad-Din forces, was the elite of the army, and Iraqi officers avidly competed to be assigned to it.
[3] Abu Tahsin al-Salihi, later dubbed "The Sheikh of Snipers" in the war against ISIS, claimed to be deployed with the expeditionary force in a brigade.
On May 17, 1987, an Iraqi Mirage fighter fired two Exocet missiles at the American ship USS Stark (FFG-31), killing thirty-seven of the crew.
In 1996, Iraqi troops moved into northern Iraq to support the Kurdish Democratic Party against the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
There were Iraqi attacks against allied aircraft in the no fly zones in January 2001, with American and British responding with bombing of targets in northern Iraq in February.
Under Saddam Hussein's presidency, Iraq had constructed state-of-the-art production facilities for the rocket propellant at Hillah, south of Baghdad, and assembled the missiles at Falluja, west of the Iraqi capital.
Other Iraqi munitions projects included Lion of Babylon tank, infrared and television-guided bombs and laser-guided missiles.
They had fibreglass-reinforced plastic radome over the antenna of the Thomson-CSF Tiger G surveillance radar with a maximum detection range of 350 km (190 nmi; 220 mi).
Other notable weapons of Iraq produced under Saddam Hussein included the Tabuk Sniper Rifle, and the Al-Fao self-propelled artillery system.
By the time Iraqis were testing biological warheads (containing anthrax and botulinum toxin) in Iraq's deserts, the 1980 to 1988 Iran–Iraq war had come to an end.
"[9] Iraqi scientists under Saddam Hussein included Nassir al-Hindawi, Rihab al-Taha and Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash as weapons designers.
The United States led a "coalition of the willing" which invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, in a war that took three weeks to get control of the country, yet the fighting lasted much longer.
Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30, 2006, after a court appointed by the interim government found him guilty of ordering the deaths of the inhabitants of an Iraqi village almost 10 years earlier.
