Dora, Baghdad
neighborhood of Baghdad in Baghdad Governorate, Iraq
Dora (also al-Dura, or ad-Durah, Arabic: الدورة, Syriac: ܕܘܿܪܵܐ) is a neighborhood in Al Rashid administrative district, southern Baghdad, Iraq. Before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was home to the city's largest concentration of Christian Assyrians, as well as Mandaeans and Muslim families.
History
The area was largely uninhabited until the 1950s when Assyrians from Habbaniya started settling down in Baghdad. Most houses and churches were built during the 1960s and 1970s while the booming neighbourhood attracted more middle-class families. Prior to the Iraq War, the area was home to the largest concentration of Assyrians and Mandeans, as well as mixed Sunni and Shi'ite families. Before the Iraq War, Dora was home to 150,000 Christians, mostly adherents of the Assyrian Church of the East and Chaldean Catholic Church.
Iraq War
In the early morning of March 19, 2003, U.S. forces initiated the invasion of Iraq by attacking a "buried command post" believed to be occupied by Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay. In fact, the target did not exist; the strike on a disused above-ground regime leadership compound killed one civilian and injured fourteen others, including one child.
In April 2004, the 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division operating as motorized infantry was assigned the task of operations in the al-Dora neighborhood. It encountered al-Qaida-affiliated fighters and fought a pitched battle immediately upon taking over control of this sector from 2-504 PIR, 82nd Airborne Division and 1-94 FA, DIVARTY, 1st Armored Division.
“Dora, Baghdad” enters the record as neighborhood of Baghdad in Baghdad Governorate, Iraq. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Dora, Baghdad and neighborhood can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5297374. Authority coordinates are 33.251, 44.392. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dora, Baghdad” 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.