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The Ba'th Party came to power in 1968 and remained for thirty-five years, until the 2003 US invasion. Under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, who became president of Iraq in 1979, a powerful authoritarian regime was created based on a system of violence and an extraordinary surveillance network, as well as reward schemes and incentives for supporters of the party. The true horrors of this regime have been exposed for the first time through a massive archive of government documents captured by the United States after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is these documents that form the basis of this extraordinarily revealing book and that have been translated and analyzed by Joseph Sassoon, an Iraqi-born scholar and seasoned commentator on the Middle East. They uncover the secrets of the innermost workings of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council, how the party was structured, how it operated via its network of informers and how the system of rewards functioned.

The reasons for the use of chemical weapons remain an understudied concept in international relations despite their continual use in conflicts. By comparing chemical weapon use by the regimes of four Arab states - Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria - over the last 50 years, this article seeks to discern the scenarios in which chemical weapons use is likely, and it offers policies to dissuade or, at least, mitigate their use.

This article deals with three metafictional novels by the Iraqi-American writer Sinan Antoon: Iʿǧām (An Iraqi Rhapsody, 2004), Yā Maryam (Hail Mary, 2012), and Waḥdahā šaǧarat al-rummān (The Pomegranate Alone, 2010), author-translated into English as The Corpse Washer (2013). The novels are set in Iraq during Ṣaddām Ḥusayn's dictatorship and in the aftermath of America's invasion. Antoon juxtaposes the terror of Iraqi life against characters seeking to survive through their mind-bending determination to see beauty in their fragmented world. To achieve his paradox, Antoon transports readers of his narrative's here-and-now into transcendent unrealities by using magical realism. A kind of three-dimensional dialectic operates between the natural and supernatural, and rationality and irrationality in which characters' find in their dreams respite by suspending accepted definitions of time, place, and identity. Writing in Arabic, Antoon highlights two conflicting functions of language and letters as vehicles of destruction and creativity. Antoon's three novels, each from its own perspective, reflect his belief that although Iraq is presently in a state of disintegration, the Iraqi people are resolute in their willingness to overcome hardship and to resurrect their nation in their lifetime.

During the 2003 war that ended Saddam Hussein's regime, coalition forces captured thousands of hours of secret recordings of meetings, phone calls and conferences. Originally prepared by the Institute for Defense Analyses for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, this study presents annotated transcripts of Iraqi audio recordings of meetings between Saddam Hussein and his inner circle. The Saddam Tapes, along with the much larger digital collection of captured records at the National Defense University's Conflict Records Research Center, will provide researchers with important insights into the inner workings of the regime and, it is hoped, the nature of authoritarian regimes more generally. The collection has implications for a range of historical questions. How did Saddam react to the pressures of his wars? How did he manage the Machiavellian world he created? How did he react to the signals and actions of the international community on matters of war and peace? Was there a difference between the public and the private Saddam on critical matters of state? A close examination of this material in the context of events and other available evidence will address these and other questions.

The Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT), as a mechanism of transitional justice, took upon it a pioneering role within the Middle Eastern Region by prosecuting and convicting several high-ranking members of the former suppressive regime in Iraq. As part of this work, the IHT confronted the widespread impunity for and disregard of gender-based crimes, such as rape and other sexual violence, and took steps towards reforming the sector through its progressive statute and the specific acknowledgment of gender crimes within its judgments. It will be the aim of the following article to extend academic writings on Iraq, the IHT and gender, by providing insights into how the tribunal dealt with the issues of rape and sexual violence, the surrounding circumstances and how successful the IHT's recognition of these crimes proved for transitional justice in Iraq.

This article explores the drivers behind Saddam Husayn's decisions to target civilians during the Iran-Iraq War. Comparing the intensity and casualty rates of Saddam's counter-city campaigns, the study asks whether their variation was linked to Iraqi battlefield performance, the type and intensity of Iranian offensives, or international attention to the matter. Analysis is based on Saddam Husayn's taped conversations with his advisers, media reports from the period, and public records from Saddam's 2004 interrogation sessions.