Irak

Más allá de la capital, las principales ciudades son Mosul, Basra, Erbil — cada una un centro de cultura regional, economía e historia. Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate and the world's largest city in 900 AD — a metropolis of a million people at the centre of the Islamic Golden Age where algebra, optics, and advances in medicine were developed before Europe's Renaissance — a heritage that the modern city, rebuilt across invasion, war, and occupation, carries with a mix of pride and grief.

Los principales idiomas hablados son árabe, kurdo, que reflejan el patrimonio cultural del país y abren puertas a una amplia comunidad internacional. Internacionalmente, Irak se contacta mediante el código +964. Iraq's Arab Shia majority, Arab Sunni minority, and Kurdish population in the north navigate an identity politics shaped by the Ottoman millet system, British colonial borders, Ba'athist secularism, and post-2003 sectarian mobilisation — creating a country where ethnic and religious identity intersects with political affiliation in ways that outside observers consistently simplify.

Irak comparte sus fronteras con Irán, Siria, Turquía, Arabia Saudí, Jordania, Kuwait. El tráfico rodado circula por la derecha, en consonancia con la convención de

La vida económica y cotidiana se rige por la zona horaria de UTC+03:00, alineando el país con sus vecinos regionales.

Masgouf — a freshwater fish (typically carp) from the Tigris River slowly grilled over tamarind wood for hours then dressed with lime and tomatoes — is Iraq's national dish, and its preparation on the river banks of Baghdad by specialist fishermen restaurants called 'masgoufs' has continued across decades of war and sanctions.

Football provides Iraq with moments of unity rare in its fraught political landscape — the 2007 AFC Asian Cup victory, achieved during the depths of sectarian civil war, generated celebrations in Baghdad streets that briefly suspended the violence, a two-day pause in conflict that became one of football's most extraordinary demonstrations of a sport's capacity to transcend politics.

The Mesopotamian Marshes of southern Iraq — the biblical Garden of Eden according to some interpretations — were drained by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s as punishment for Shia population resistance, then partially restored after 2003 in a rewilding project that returned the Marsh Arabs (Ma'dan) to water-based village life and reestablished one of the world's largest wetland ecosystems.