Baghdad — Capital of Iraq

Baghdad was founded in 762 CE by the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur, who built it as a purpose-designed capital laid out as a nearly perfect circle — a plan reflected in its original name, Madinat al-Salam, 'City of Peace' — with the caliph's palace and the central mosque at the very center of concentric walls, a deliberate statement of ordered, divinely sanctioned rule.

Within a few generations, Baghdad grew into one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the world and the intellectual center of the Islamic Golden Age, home to the House of Wisdom, a major center of translation and scholarship where Greek, Persian, and Indian scientific and philosophical texts were rendered into Arabic and built upon by scholars working in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.

That golden age ended abruptly and violently in 1258, when Mongol forces under Hulagu Khan sacked Baghdad, destroyed much of its infrastructure including irrigation systems that had sustained the surrounding region for centuries, and reportedly killed a large portion of the population — a catastrophe from which the city's status as a leading center of the Islamic world never fully recovered, even after it was rebuilt.

Baghdad passed through Mongol successor states, the Ottoman Empire, and British administration before becoming the capital of the modern Kingdom of Iraq when the state was established in 1921 under British mandate, and it has remained Iraq's capital through the monarchy's overthrow in 1958, decades of Ba'athist rule, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and the years of conflict and reconstruction that followed.

Despite the destruction of 1258 and further damage across the 20th and early 21st centuries, Baghdad retains historic sites including the Abbasid Palace and sections of the old city, and it remains Iraq's largest city and its political, economic, and cultural center by a wide margin.

The Iraq National Museum, home to one of the world's most significant collections of Mesopotamian antiquities, was extensively looted during the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, with thousands of artifacts stolen; a portion have since been recovered through international efforts, but the looting remains one of the most widely cited cultural losses of the 2003 invasion.

Since 2003, a large fortified area in central Baghdad known as the Green Zone has housed foreign embassies, including the U.S. embassy, and Iraqi government buildings behind extensive security barriers, a highly visible physical legacy of the post-invasion period that has only gradually been scaled back as security conditions in the city have changed over the years since.

Baghdad's Mutanabbi Street, named after a celebrated 10th-century Arab poet, has functioned for generations as the city's historic center of bookselling and literary culture, and a 2007 car bombing that devastated the street prompted a widely publicized rebuilding effort supported by writers and cultural figures both inside and outside Iraq, who treated the street's recovery as a symbol of the city's broader cultural resilience.

Baghdad straddles both banks of the Tigris, with the historic Rusafa district on the eastern side and the Karkh district on the west, a division dating back to the city's earliest Abbasid-era planning; several bridges connect the two halves, and the Tigris itself has long served as both a transport corridor and, at times, a contested boundary line during periods of internal conflict within the city.

Baghdad's Al-Mutanabbi and Al-Rasheed streets together preserve some of the city's most architecturally significant 19th- and early 20th-century Ottoman- and British-era buildings, many showing visible decades of neglect and war damage, and a number of recent restoration initiatives, both governmental and grassroots, have specifically targeted these historic commercial corridors as part of a broader push to revive central Baghdad's pre-2003 street life.