Like its predecessor, this study is an attempt to treat in a concise and objective manner the dominant social, political, economic, and military aspects of contemporary Iraqi society. Sources of information included scholarly journals and monographs, official reports of governments and international organizations, newspapers, and numerous periodicals. Unfortunately there was a dearth of information from official Iraqi sources, as well as a lack of sociological data resulting from field work by scholars in Iraq in the 1980s. Chapter bibliographies appear at the end of the book; brief comments on some of the more valuable sources suggested as possible further reading appear at the end of each chapter. Measurements are given in the metric system; a conversion table is provided to assist those readers who are unfamiliar with metric measurements (see table 1, Appendix). A glossary is also included.

The transliteration of Arabic words and phrases follows a modified version of the system adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographic Names for British Official Use, known as the BGN/PCGN system. The modification is a significant one, however, in that diacritical markings and hyphens have been omitted. Moreover, some geographical locations, such as the cities of Babylon, Kirkuk, Mosul, and Nineveh, are so well known by these conventional names that their formal names--Babil, Karkuk, Al Mawsil, and Ninawa, respectively, are not used.

Edited by
Helen Chapin Metz

Research Completed May 1988

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Source: U.S. Library of Congress