Al Anbar Governorate
governorate in Iraq
Al Anbar Governorate (Arabic: محافظة الأنبار; muḥāfaẓat al-’Anbār), or Anbar Province, is the largest governorate in Iraq by area. Encompassing much of the country's western territory, it shares borders with Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. The population is mostly Sunni Arabs. The provincial capital is Ramadi; other important cities include Fallujah, Al-Qa'im, Rawah and Haditha.
The governorate was known as Ramadi up to 1976 when it was renamed as Al Anbar governorate, and it was known as Dulaim before 1962. A large majority of the inhabitants of the province are Arab Sunni Muslims and most belong to the Dulaim tribe.
Al-Anbar Governorate, holding many Sunni previous supporters of Saddam Hussein, was a major center of the primarily Sunni, Islamist and Ba'athist-affiliated Iraqi insurgency, being the place of the battles in Fallujah and Ramadi.
In early 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, with the assistance of some local Sunni militias, launched a successful campaign to seize control of the province from the Iraqi government. Numerous offensive actions were undertaken by the Iraqi government, with the assistance of local Sunni tribes to remove ISIL's occupation of the province, especially in the Anbar campaign (2015–16), the Western Anbar offensive (September 2017) and the 2017 Western Iraq campaign. The area was effectively recaptured by the end of 2017 and has been at peace since then.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Al Anbar Governorate” is governorate in Iraq. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Anbar, Governorate and governorate, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “governorate in Iraq” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q187334. VIAF identifies the subject as 242778650. Authority coordinates are 32.900, 41.600. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1962, 2014 and 2015.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Al Anbar Governorate” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.