The deadliest battle in human history probably took place less than eight centuries ago...
According to historians, the Battle of Baghdad in 1258 was quite a butchery.
The number of deaths is estimated at nearly 2,050,000.
It must be said that by invading the city, the Mongols did not have any pity: they killed all the civilians.
On February 10, 1258, after a two-week siege, Baghdad fell into the hands of Houlegou (or Hulagu Khan), a grandson, barely 30 years old, of the terrible Genghis Khan.
The Mongols of Houlegou methodically massacred the population and tortured the last Arab caliph, al-Mustasim.
This one was sewn into a bag and trampled at the horses' feet!
500 years earlier, the Arabs had made Baghdad the seat of the Caliphate, in other words the capital of Islam, at the junction of the Arab, Hellenistic and Persian worlds.
A new civilization had been born on the banks of the Euphrates, fertilized by Greek and Persian cultures, and the caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty, such as Harun al-Rashid, a contemporary of Charlemagne, had made the Western world dream.
This Arab-Persian civilization was therefore destroyed by the Mongols.
The ruin of Baghdad was completed by the eruption of Tamerlan, a distant descendant of Genghis Khan.
From then on, the prestigious capital will only be ruins and the destruction of irrigation networks by the Mongols will reduce the populations to poverty.
The decline of the country, now called Iraq is becoming inevitable.
The old Mesopotamia was long torn between the Persians, Muslims of the Shia faith, and the Ottoman Turks, Muslims of the Sunni faith.
It will fall under the supervision of the latter at the beginning of the 16th century after the military campaigns of Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of Istanbul.
This one will definitively annex Iraq to its empire in 1533.
Modern Iraq was created at the end of the First World War by the British on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
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