LATEST UPDATE: JANUARY 2000

Iraq's continuing difficulties in international relations were worsened in 1997 by its refusal to co-operate with UNSCOM personnel responsible for monitoring the production of chemical and biological weapons. In 1998, as Iraq continued to fail to comply with UN resolutions, allied forces of the United States and Britain launched a series of military strikes against the country, and the USA increased support, including funding, for Iraqi exile and other opposition groups. Saddam Hussein introduced draconian measures to prevent the economic collapse of the country, such as the amputation of hands as a punishment for theft and 'economic crimes'. The government crackdown on all opposition has involved mass arrests, torture and executions, mainly of Shi'ites and Kurds, but also of dissidents in the Sunni Arab community, including hundreds of army officers.

Despite an appalling record of human rights violations, Saddam Hussein's regime has rarely threatened the physical safety of Iraq's Jews in recent years. Nonetheless, the murder in October 1998 of two Jews in the Baghdad synagogue, while not publicly condoned by the Iraqi authorities, has increased concern for the dwindling Jewish community. Within the context of growing international isolation and increasing hostility towards the USA, antisemitism in the state-controlled Iraqi media surfaces primarily in the context of anti-Israel or anti-western commentary, although such statements appear to have diminished somewhat over the last three years.

Demographic data

Total population: 22 million (July 1999 estimate)

Jewish population: 100

Ethnic groups: Arabs (75-80 per cent), Kurds (15-20 per cent), Turkomans, Assyrians, Yazidis and Armenians (5 per cent)

Religions: Islam (official state religion) 97 per cent: despite the fact that they dominate the ruling elite, Sunni Muslims (including Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans) comprise only some 35 per cent of the total population, and Shi'ite Muslims make up 62 per cent; Christians (including Chaldeans, Assyrians, Roman Catholics, Armenians) and Jews, 3 per cent

Languages: Arabic, Kurdish (official in Kurdish regions), Assyrian, Armenian

Political data

Political system: constitutional republic

Capital: Baghdad

Government: Despite a series of continuing domestic challenges, political power in Iraq remains concentrated largely in the hands of President Saddam Hussein  - president since 1979, prime minister and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council - and a single party, the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party,  of which Saddam is secretary-general. Among Saddam Hussein's foremost supporters are his own tribal federation of albu-Nasir, which hails from the area of Tikrit, and the Sunni Muslim population of Iraq, residing in a triangle between Baghdad, Al Mawsil (Mosul) and the Syrian border. Tribal support has been diminishing in recent years and internal dissent has prompted a number of unsuccessful plots to topple the current regime. In response, the Iraqi dictator has used harsh measures to eliminate potential opposition among civilian, military and tribal leaders as well as members of his family and clan.

Opposition political organizations are illegal and severely suppressed.

Economic data (CIA World Factbook 1999)

GDP 1998 (est.): US$52.3 billion

GDP growth 1998 (est.): 10 per cent

Iraq's eight-year war with Iran (1980-8), its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the 1991 war against a US-led coalition, and the massive Shi'ite and Kurdish uprisings that followed have ravaged the economy. Much of the country's industrial and agricultural infrastructure has been destroyed and very many people now face severe food shortages and rocketing inflation. The imposition of United Nations sanctions has exacerbated economic hardship.

Under Ottoman rule, which began in the sixteenth century, the Jewish community in Iraq was fairly prosperous. The advent of British rule in 1917 enabled Jews to become involved in local government, but when Iraq became independent in 1932 discrimination against Jews became institutionalized.

During the 1930s and up to the anti-British and pro-Nazi Rashid Ali revolt of May 1941, anti-Jewish sentiments among Iraqi intellectuals, army officers and politicians were intensified by Nazi influence in Baghdad, as well as by the Jewish-Arab conflict in mandatory Palestine.

In June 1941 a wide-ranging pogrom took place: 129 Jews were murdered, many hundreds were wounded and much Jewish property was looted and destroyed.

  In August 1948 many Jews were imprisoned on charges of 'Zionism' and a few were executed for espionage on trumped-up charges. In early 1950 Jews were allowed to leave for Israel, but were required to relinquish their Iraqi citizenship and forfeit their assets. The virulent anti-Jewish atmosphere in Baghdad and the introduction of anti-Jewish laws persuaded approximately _ approximately 120,000 Jews to emigrate in 1950-1. Under the republican rule of General 'Abdal-Karim Qasim (1958-63), many Jews were released from prison and deported. The situation of the Jews deteriorated during the periods of Ba'ath rule and the rule of the Arif brothers (1963-8).

Following the 1967 Six-Day War Jews were subject to severe restrictions and were forbidden, for example, to leave their home towns. Some 300 Jewish business-owners and community leaders were arrested and tortured for 'espionage' or for 'economic support for Israel', and all Jewish communal property was seized by the government.

When the Ba'ath Party came to power, it conducted an espionage trial and the public hanging of thirteen young Jews. By 1971 about forty Jews had either been executed or had died under torture, and many more were jailed. In the summers of 1970 and 1971 hundreds of Jews were smuggled out of Baghdad by Kurds loyal to Mullah Mustafa al-Barazani, through de facto independent Kurdistan to Iran, and on to Israel. Because of increasing international pressure, most of Iraq's remaining Jews were eventually allowed to leave the country in 1972-3.

During the 1991 war against Iran and the Kuwait crisis, antisemitic themes were commonplace in the regime’s war propaganda. Most conspicuous were claims that the Persian enemy had an ancient alignment with the Jews, dating back to the era of the Persian empire of Cyrus and his successors.

Shi’ite Muslims

Both Shi’ite Muslims and Kurds (together comprising some 80 per cent of the population) are generally hostile to the ruling regime dominated by Sunni Muslims. The regime continues to launch military attacks on Shi'ites living in the southern marshes and to divert humanitarian supplies destined for them to the security forces.

Among the thousands of killings, arrests, expulsions, desecrations and other human rights abuses committed against Shi'ite Muslims, the murders of three leading clerics are noteworthy. In April 1998 Ayatollah Maratha al-Buried was shot dead in An Najaf, the center of Shi'ite theological activities, followed in June by the murder of Grand Ayatollah Mira 'Ali al-Cheraw - an Iranian with an extensive following - on a road between Kabala and An Najaf. In November 1998 eight persons were arrested in connection with these killings, the motive for which, according to the authorities, was robbery. In February 1999 another leading cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq Al-Sadr, and two of his sons were murdered. A third son was later arrested, along with most of Al-Sadr's followers. Funeral processions and public mourning for the clerics were prohibited.

Non-Arab minorities

Non-Arabs are denied equal access to employment, education and physical security. They are not permitted to sell their homes except to Arabs, nor to register or inherit property.

The regime continues to persecute the Kurdish minority in the North by, for example, blocking its supply of food, medicine and other goods. In January 1999 the authorities ordered the forcible expulsion of nearly 1,500 Kurdish families resident in the urban centre of Kirkuk to areas under Kurdish control (i.e. under the de facto control of two rival political factions, the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK)). The order - allegedly made for reasons of 'security and geographical importance' but in keeping with the regime's Arabization campaign in the region- also called for the detention of one person from each targetted family as 'hostages' until the expulsion of the family was complete. The oil-rich Kirkuk region

  In fact, all non-Arab residents of the oil-rich Kirkuk region - including ethnic Turkomans and Assyrians - have been subjected to harassment and forced expulsion, as the regime seeks to gain Arab demographic control of the area. Between January and November 1999, according to local Kurdish authorities, 362 families were deported from the region. Some deportees are permitted to remain in their homes if they relinquish their Kurdish or Turkoman identity and register as Arabs.

Assyrian groups in Arbil (North) reported a series of bombings in December 1998, January 1999 and December 1999, causing three deaths in all. The perpetrators remain unknown, but some Assyrians have indicated that they believe them to be part of a terror campaign by Kurdish forces to drive them from northern Iraq. In August 1999 they reported the beating of inhabitants of Assyrian villages by members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).

Two members of Iraq's dwindling Jewish community were shot dead in October 1998 during an attack on the only active synagogue in Baghdad. The Iraqi authorities, including President Saddam Hussein, condemned the attack and charged a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian with the attack

The political links between Israel, the Jews and the United States are often emphasized in speeches and articles. It has been frequently claimed that the USA and Europe are controlled by 'Jewish finance' and that the Allied attack on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait was a 'Jewish-Zionist plot'.

In recent years many antisemitic statements have appeared in a publication entitled Babel, which is owned by Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday.

  Since 1998, the Iraqi media have frequently drawn attention to the Jewish background of members of the American administration such as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Secretary of Defence William Cohen. In July 1998, for example, the government daily, al-Thawra, stated: 'Given that the Zionists occupy Congress and that the Jewish ministers are the ones who make US foreign policy decisions, we are not surprised at all at this US hostility toward Iraq and the Arab nation.'

In December 1998, Iraqi television condemned the US-led military strike against Iraq by suggesting that the US was attempting to avenge the Bani Qaynuqa and the Bani Nazir, Jewish tribes expelled from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century by the Prophet Muhammed.

Arabic translations of classical antisemitic texts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's Mein Kampf are widely available in Iraq.

A leading Iraqi imam, Abu Hamza Al-Masri, was quoted on 24 February 1998 in the London-based Islamist newspaper Al-Hayat as saying that 'the duty of every Muslim is to help the Iraqi people and to come to the aid of Saddam and his government and act against the Jews and the Christians and anyone who harms the blood, the honour and the possessions of the Muslim people and puts fear into them through words or deeds'. The quotation also included the statement that 'there is no place in Iraq for Jews and Christians and they have no contract to protect them. Their presence is therefore forbidden and it is permitted to shed their blood.

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© JPR 2000