Ministry of Defence (Iraq)
Iraqi government ministry responsible for military and national defense matters
The Ministry of Defence (Arabic: وزارة الدفاع العراقية) is a central government ministry of Iraq responsible for national defence. It is also involved with internal security.
Authority
The Ministry directs all the Iraqi Armed Forces, comprising a Joint Headquarters, the Iraqi Ground Forces Command (which controls the Army), the Iraqi Special Operations Forces, the Iraqi Army, the Iraqi Navy (including Marines), and the Iraqi Air Force.
History
The Ministry was dissolved by Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2 of mid-2003. It was formally re-established by CPA Order 67 of 21 March 2004. In the interim period, the CPA Office of Security Affairs served as the de facto Ministry of Defence.
The Iraqi Counter Terrorism Bureau directs the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Command, which is a further military force answerable to the Prime Minister of Iraq directly. As of 30 June 2009, there had been legislation in progress for a year to make the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Bureau a separate ministry.
Minister of defence
The position of Minister of Defence became vacant in the previous Iraqi cabinet, approved on 21 December 2010. While it was vacant, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki served as the acting defence minister.
“Ministry of Defence (Iraq)” enters the record as iraqi government ministry responsible for military and national defense matters. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Ministry, Defence and Iraq can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4118986. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2004, 2009 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ministry of Defence (Iraq)” 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.