Iraqi Armed Forces

The Iraqi Armed Forces are the military forces of the Republic of Iraq. They consist of the Ground Forces, the Air Force, the Navy and the Air Defence Command. The armed forces are administered by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Effective control of the armed forces rests with the prime minister of Iraq. Along with the primary service branches, there exists two non-MoD agencies that are part of the armed forces and report directly to the prime minister; namely, the Counter Terrorism Service and the Popular Mobilization Forces. The armed forces of Iraq were initially formed in the early 1920s. Six military coup d'états were mounted by the army between 1936 and 1941. They first saw combat in the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941. They fought against Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, in the 1967 Six-Day War, and in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Two wars against the Kurds were fought during 1961-1970 and 1974–1975. A much larger conflict was the Iran–Iraq War, initiated by the Iraqis in 1980, which continued until 1988. Thereafter Iraq began the invasion of Kuwait, which led to the Gulf War of 1991, which led in turn to confrontations over the Iraqi no-fly zones during the 1990s, and finally the Iraq War of 2003, which resulted in the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces imposed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. The nascent post-Iraq war Iraqi armed forces were engaged in anti-insurgency during the insurgency and civil war that followed the US-led invasion of the country. The latest major conflict in which the armed forces of the country participated was the war against ISIS during 2013-2017. Logistics and combat engineering have been traditional strong points. Iraqi soldiers have also usually fought hard in difficult situations. After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which resulted in the...