Present
In general elections the Iraq is elected, in December 2005, their first non-interim government since the invasion. The violence had not abated and many Sunni leaders denounced irregularities during the elections. Between February and April, suicide attacks against Shiite targets continued. On April 22, reelected President Talabani invited Shiite leader Nuri al-Maliki to form the new government. According to the Iraq Body Count organization, by May 2006 some 50,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the US-led military intervention.However, a study supervised by Johns Hopkins University, published in October put the figure at 655 thousand dead.
In May, Nuri al-Maliki became Prime Minister, and the following month he presented a national reconciliation plan to Parliament. The increasingly unstable situation in the country threatened, in August, to escalate into a civil war. Although this did not want to be admitted by the United States government, other spokesmen – among them the British ambassador to Iraq, William Paty – saw this possibility, as well as the division of the country by ethnicity, as an increasingly concrete fact.
In November of 2006, Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of 148 people in the Shiite city of Dujai. That same month, the defeat of the Republicans in the elections for the renewal of parliament, culminated in the resignation of the defense minister, Donald Rumsfeld, and a series of speculations about a change in strategy by Washington with respect to Iraq.
Finally, at dawn on the morning of December 30, Hussein was secretly hanged, in front of a small number of witnesses. Once the news was known, the Iraqi government decreed a curfew in several cities to prevent possible outbreaks of violence. Different governments and world leaders agreed that the execution of Hussein would not serve to pacify the country.
The UK-based humanitarian organization Oxfam released a report in August 2007, in which it noted that due to the violence in the country, the humanitarian crisis that they are experiencing almost a third of the population was being forgotten. According to the organization, 70% of Iraqis did not have access to safe drinking water and only 20% of the population had access to sanitation services, a figure comparable to that of sub-Saharan African countries.
The presence of North American troops, in addition to causing hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and extreme unsanitary conditions, has caused an evident social gloom reflected in extremely deteriorated health, nutrition, education and other indicators.
Oil wealth
Despite ranking fourth among oil producers, Iraq has been immersed in a huge energy crisis for several years [7] .
With the implementation of the Iraqi law on hydrocarbons in 2007, control of all oil revenues and production passed into the hands of British and American transnationals; In this way, at gunpoint, the nation was stripped of control of its main resource and also witnessed how most of its jobs were granted to foreign subcontractors. As a consequence, instability and violence settled there, which caused the destruction of electricity generation equipment: the fall of 22 transmission towers in April and May 2010. This means that currently 7,000 megawatts are produced in Iraq, of the 12,000 that the country demands, so there are places where the supply of electricity can only be one to three hours a day.
Such a panorama has scourged the quality of life of the population, which is why today Iraqis are demonstrating in cities and towns to demand a political-social change in their country and the end of the occupation.
Sports
As a country located in Middle East according to EHOTELAT.COM, Iraq has a sports tradition, sports such as Football, Basketball, Swimming, Boxing and Tennis are popular in the country.
After the war unleashed by the United States, athletes have become the target of kidnappings and murders. In May 2006, members of the national tennis team training for the Davis Cup were assassinated in Baghdad. According to the general secretary of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, Amer Jabbar, the three men were killed by Sunni extremists because they were dressed in shorts and tennis shirts:
Two gunmen killed coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and two players Nasser Ali Hatem and Wissam Adel Odah on Thursday afternoon in the Saidiya district, south of the capital. [14]
However, tennis teacher Haider Abbud, an Iraqi who immigrated to Maryland after Hussein’s inauguration in 1969 and returned to Iraq after the invasion as part of the US delegation, refuted this hypothesis:
When Nasser began teaching tennis, insurgents contacted him and asked him to explode a bomb at the club. Nasser told them no. When he told me, we looked for another house for him and his family, but he didn’t want to stop teaching tennis. I’m sure he was killed for refusing to carry out an attack. [fifteen]
Soccer
Soccer is the most popular sport and played in Iraq, its National Team was champion of Asia in 2007 after beating the Saudi Arabian team in the final, the event took place in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. In 2006 Iraq reached the final of the Asian Games of that year held in Doha, Qatar after defeating South Korea in the semifinals but fell in the final and took the silver medal.
The Iraq Football Association is the governing body for football in Iraq, as well as controlling its national team and the Iraqi Super League. The Association was founded in 1948, and has been a member of FIFA since 1950 and the Asian Football Confederation since 1971.
Popular soccer clubs
- Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya – from Baghdad
- Al Zawraa – Based in Baghdad
- Najaf FC – by Najaf
- Al-Shorta – from Baghdad
- Arbil FC by Arbil
- Mosul FC – from Mosul
- Al Talaba of Baghdad
- Karbalaa FC by Karbala
- Al Naft of Baghdad
- To the Minaa of Basra
- Al Jaish of Baghdad
- Al Karkh (known as Al Rasheed until 1991).
Basketball
In Iraq, there are at least two basketball associations, the first is the Iraqi Basketball Association, which is the country’s professional organization, within which a large part of the adult leagues and the youth leagues are registered; the other important association is the Premier League, for elite players.
Basketball in Iraq stands out, like everything in Iraq today, for its precariousness. Journalist Larry Kaplow described the situation in 2006:
The games are played on courts without air conditioning; the courts, which are deteriorated to the extreme, sometimes the electronic boards fall, they are empty despite the fact that the tickets are free (people do not cheer up for fear of the bombs), and that many players are students or cafeteria waiters. Kahraba coach Hamza Obeid incentivized his players with $ 2 per dunk and 65 cents per rebound. [16]
Many Iraqi basketball teams are sponsored by local or national companies, such as Kahraba Electricity, a team that is funded by the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity.
