Category: Uprising, from Wikidata’s class “rebellion”
Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013)
Part of: Arab Spring
Wikidata classes on our event-class list: rebellion (all its classes: Wikidata item)
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The Iraqi insurgency was an insurgency that began in late 2011 after the end of the Iraq War and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, resulting in violent conflict with the central government, as well as low-level sectarian violence among Iraq's religious groups.
The insurgency was a direct continuation of events following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Sunni militant groups stepped up attacks targeting the country's majority Shia population to undermine confidence in the Shia-led government and its efforts to protect people without coalition assistance. Many Sunni factions stood against the Syrian government, which Shia groups moved to support, and numerous members of both sects also crossed the border to fight in Syria.
In 2014, the insurgency escalated dramatically following the conquest of Mosul and major areas in northern Iraq by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a Salafi jihadist militant group and unrecognised proto-state that follows a fundamentalist, Qutbi-Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam. ISIL gained global prominence in early 2014 when it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities in its Western Iraq offensive, followed by its capture of Mosul and the Sinjar massacre, thereby merging the new conflict with the Syrian Civil War, into a new, far deadlier conflict.
Text retrieved 2026-09-26 from Wikipedia.
Cite this
The link is the Wikipedia revision of July 8, 2026 (revision 1363233790), whose lead is exactly the text shown here.
APA 7
Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013). (2026, July 8). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Iraqi_insurgency_(2011%E2%80%932013)&oldid=1363233790
MLA 9
“Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 July 2026, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Iraqi_insurgency_(2011%E2%80%932013)&oldid=1363233790.
Chicago (note)
Wikipedia, “Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013),” last modified July 8, 2026, 22:10 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Iraqi_insurgency_(2011%E2%80%932013)&oldid=1363233790.
Chicago (shortened note)
Wikipedia, “Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013).”
Chicago cites well-known reference works such as Wikipedia in notes only, not in the bibliography.
This event on Middle East, 1900–present: https://middleeast.events/event/iraqi-insurgency-2011-2013
If you use the map’s borders: CShapes 2.0 - historical country borders. Schvitz, G., et al. (2022). CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. https://icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes/ (modified by middleeast.events); West Bank Areas A/B/C: UN OCHA / HDX "Oslo Agreement" Areas A/B/C (West Bank). Distributed under the legacy HumanitarianResponse.info terms: non-commercial use with credit to UN OCHA. https://data.humdata.org/dataset/state-of-palestine-other-0-0-0-0-0; some corrected border points: GeoNames - CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). https://www.geonames.org/
Includes 2 events in this dataset
No map location: Wikipedia and Wikidata give no coordinates for this event, so it has no marker on the map.
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by Wikipedia contributors, from the article Iraqi insurgency (2011–2013). Classes are Wikidata’s labels (CC0). “Part of” is Wikidata’s statement, in its labels (CC0).