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I RAQ AT W AR AND R EBUILDING

the country since the 1960s. Inspired by successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrian protesters used marches, hunger strikes, rioting, vandalism, and guerrilla attacks in an attempt to overthrow the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian uprising soon devolved into a full-blown civil war. In Iraq, Arab Spring protests began in early 2012, as Sunni Muslims boycotted the Shiite-dominated government, claiming that it was trying to minimize Sunnis. In addition, both Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites were galvanized by the Syrian civil war, and many militants from both sects crossed the border to fight in Syria. During 2013 Sunni militant groups increased their attacks, tar- geting the Iraq's Shia population in an attempt to undermine con- fidence in the government. In 2014 Sunni insurgents belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group seized control of large swathes of land including several major Iraqi cities, like Tikrit, Fallujah and Mosul creating hundreds of thousands of internally displaced per- sons amid reports of atrocities by ISIL fighters.

Text-Dependent Questions

1. What United Nations agency was responsible for making sure Iraq dismantled its WMD programs? 2. Where was Saddam Hussein captured? What happened to him? 3. What events helped to fuel the current conflict in Iraq that began in 2011?

Research Project In late 2010, sparked by the self-immolation of a fruit vendor in Tunisia, anti-government protests began to erupt throughout the Arab world. The ongoing protests are aimed at improving the political circumstances and living condi- tions of the Arab people, and have become known in the West as the “Arab Spring.” Using your school library or the internet, find out more about the origin of the Arab Spring protests. Take a blank map of the Arab countries (one can be printed online from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arab_world_location_map.svg). Label and mark the countries where protesters succeeded in overthrowing or changing governments.