Talk:Iraq

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Discussion for: Iraq • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Iraq is the Country page for Iraq. It covers the Akkadian plant names that have been read as hemp; the Arabic words for the plant; the medieval record as summarised in the secondary literature; drug control under the British Mandate and the kingdom, including the ban on growing hemp; the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law No. 50 of 2017; trafficking routes, cultivation cases and seizure figures; and the two seed lots named Iraqi Pilgrim. The tables of growing regions, growing areas and accessions fill from pages that name Iraq as their country.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources and how they were read

Law No. 50 of 2017 was read in the copy of al-Waqāʾiʿ al-ʿIrāqiyya no. 4446 (8 May 2017) published by the Ministry of Justice. The PDF's text layer stores the Arabic-Indic digits in reverse order, so every article number, date and amount on the page was read from the page images. Page numbers are the Gazette's printed ones. The Iraqi Legal Database could not be reached, so no amendment after 2017 has been checked.
Mandate reports: the Colonial Office's annual reports on the administration of Iraq for April 1923 to December 1924 (Colonial No. 13), 1926 (No. 29), 1927 (No. 35) and 1930 (No. 62), read in Google-digitised scans on the Internet Archive. The OCR does not show whether a page number stands at the head or the foot of its page, so each passage is cited to the pair of pages it falls between.
League of Nations: the Advisory Committee's report on its nineteenth session (4 December 1934) and its analytical study of governments' annual reports for 1938 (27 August 1940), both read in OCR of Digital Library of India scans. The 1934 OCR is badly garbled; the passage on the countries that had prohibited Indian hemp is paraphrased, not quoted.
Assyriology: Thompson's A Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (1949), pp. 220–223, in Internet Archive OCR (the Akkadian forms and sigla are garbled in it), and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 1 part II (1968, azallû, pp. 524–525) and vol. 13 (1982, qunnabu, p. 306), in the Institute's open-access PDFs.
Medieval period: Nahas (1982) was read in a reproduction of its introduction; the journal details were confirmed in Europe PMC. Al-Muqaddasi is cited through the passage quoted in Hansen and colleagues (2026), who use Collins's translation.
Trade and enforcement: the UNODC report Drug Trafficking Dynamics across Iraq and the Middle East (2019–2023) (July 2024), pp. 10, 18, 21, 25 and 39; news reports of a US military release (Stars and Stripes, 2006), a statement of the Sulaymaniyah security forces (Rudaw, 2023), a statement of the Interior Ministry to the state news agency (Kurdistan24, 2022) and a National Security Service operation (Shafaq News, 2026).
Germplasm: the GRIN-Global page for G 33392; the Plants of the World Online distribution for Cannabis sativa; the Derg Corra Collective's description of its Iraqi Pilgrim line, used only for that line.
Words: an online edition of Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon (entry qinnab) and the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry "Bang".

Where the sources differ

Seizure figures in the UNODC report. Annex 1 (p. 39), headed "Annual volumes of drugs seized in Iraq", gives hashish as 20.6 kg (2019), 19.8, 45.2, 54.7 and 119.3 kg (2023). Those are the figures of Figure 4 (p. 21) for cannabis resin seized in the Kurdistan Region alone, which the report says form part of the national totals. Figure 3 (p. 18) gives the national series as 126, 309, 242, 128 and 270 kg. Its other columns agree with Figure 3 except opium in 2021. The page gives Figure 3 for Iraq and Figure 4 for the Kurdistan Region.
Azallû and qunnabu. Thompson (1949) held azallû to be hemp beyond doubt. The Chicago dictionary (1968) gives only "a medicinal plant" and finds narcotic use in one commentary passage and one other text. For qunnabu the dictionary (1982) allows "possibly" hemp seed or flower, where Thompson, after Scheil, read cannabis. McPartland and Small (2020), citing Seidel (1989), treat qunubu as a cannabis word. The page attributes each reading and does not state the identification as settled.
Iraq's first drug law. The sources read give a Ministry of Interior notification of 1926 (no number), a ban on growing hemp in force by 1930 (no instrument named), an accession law passed before 1931 (no number), and Law No. 44 of 1938, which amended "existing legislation". Which instrument first banned the plant is not established. A "Law No. 12 of 1933" on Indian hemp and the opium poppy is mentioned online but could not be traced to a readable source and is not used.
Iraqi Pilgrim. The Derg Corra Collective line and USDA G 33392 share a name and a story of seed gathered across Iraq by a pilgrim. No identifier links the two, so the page says only that they share the name.

Not used, and why

The date 1230 for the arrival of cannabis. A statement that cannabis was brought to Iraq in 1230, in the reign of the caliph al-Mustansir, by the retinue of visiting Bahraini rulers circulates online. Its source has not been read and it is not on the page.
Nahas on the Seljuks. Nahas places the spread of hashish in Islamic society after the Seljuks took Baghdad in the 11th century; the passage concerns Islamic society at large, not Iraq, and is not used.
The pilgrims' cannabis. The seed company's account of pilgrims smoking cannabis in Iraqi towns is used only on the accession page, not for the country.
Afghanistan as the origin. Kurdistan24 adds that the drugs smuggled from Iran originated in Afghanistan; that is the outlet's gloss, not the ministry's statement, and is not used.
Fuzûlî. The poet of Beng ü Bâde (see Turkey) is associated with Iraq, but the sources read do not place the poem there, and it is not on this page.

Open questions

Rosenthal. Franz Rosenthal's The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society (Brill, 1971) has not been read, nor the medieval Arabic primaries it uses. The Abbasid paragraph rests on Nahas's summary.
Ottoman Iraq. No source on hashish or hemp in the vilayets of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul has been read.
The hemp ban. The instrument that prohibited growing hemp at the end of the 1920s, and the text of Law No. 44 of 1938, have not been read.
The flora. The Cannabaceae treatment in the Flora of Iraq (vol. 4 part 1, 1980) has not been read, so whether cannabis is recorded there wild, ruderal or cultivated is not known.
Iraqi Arabic and Kurdish names. The dialect dictionaries (Woodhead and Beene, 1967; Chyet, 2003) could not be consulted.
Modern use. No national survey of cannabis use has been read.