Country
Iraq
A post-2003 intelligence community rebuilt around the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS), with substantial historical inheritance from the dissolved Saddam-era Mukhabarat services.
The Republic of Iraq's intelligence community was substantially rebuilt after the 2003 US-led invasion and the May 2003 dissolution of the Saddam Hussein-era security services by Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2. The Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS, Jihāz al-Mukhābarāt al-Waṭanī al-ʿIrāqī) is the principal civilian intelligence service, established in 2004 under US tutelage. The Falcons Intelligence Cell (Suqour al-Istikhbarat) and successor units of the Counter-Terrorism Service handle specialised counter-terrorism intelligence. Military intelligence is the responsibility of the Iraqi Directorate of Military Intelligence.
The Iraqi services operate in an unusually complex environment, with substantial parallel and sometimes competing influence of US, Iranian, and other regional services across successive Iraqi governments. The post-2014 campaign against the Islamic State, the 2017 reorganisation of Iraqi security architecture, and the post-2019 Iraqi protest period have all reshaped the operational posture. The historical record of the Saddam-era Mukhabarat — including its role in mass detention, the suppression of Kurdish and Shia opposition, and successive regional operations — has been the subject of substantial post-2003 evidentiary collection through the Iraq Memory Foundation, the Hoover Institution's Ba'ath Party records, and successive Iraqi tribunal proceedings.
How to read a country page
This is the institutional landscape of Iraq's intelligence apparatus as it is documented in the public record. Each card above links through to a full agency profile — the service's founding date, statutory basis, jurisdiction, parent ministry, headquarters, official channels, and a structured account of role, history, and notable operations footnoted to primary sources. The agencies on this page may overlap institutionally (a foreign-intelligence service and a signals-intelligence service often share missions and personnel) and may operate against one another in counter-intelligence terms; the country page does not impose a hierarchy among them, only an inventory.
If a particular operation or scandal is what you are looking for rather than the institutional background, see the Dossiers — long-form pieces that cross agencies and countries. The methodology page documents how operations are categorised as confirmed, alleged, or disputed, and what the public record can and cannot tell us. The Lexicon defines the terms that recur across these pages — HUMINT, SIGINT, covert action, plausible deniability, station, asset, finding.
Coverage here grows as new declassifications expand what can responsibly be said about services that remain partly closed. Some agencies have full reference entries; others are stub entries pending the full treatment. Stubs are kept on the index so navigation between related services is preserved while the detailed text is written.