1st Corps (Iraq)

The 1st Corps was a corps of the Iraqi Army, established before the Iran–Iraq War. It was located in the north of Iraq.

In 1977–78 British military attaches' reports from Baghdad said the 4th Infantry Division was part of the corps, with divisional headquarters at Mosul and brigades at Mosul (5th), Dohuk (18th), Sinjar (21st), plus two unlocated reserve brigades, the 93rd and 99th. Other divisions of the corps reportedly included the 2nd Division at Kirkuk with five brigades, including two reserve; the 7th Division at Sulaimaniyah with five brigades (all active); and the 8th Division at Erbil with six brigades, including the 91st, 95th, and 98th Reserve Brigades.

At the beginning of the Iran–Iraq War, Malovany shows corps headquarters at Kirkuk; the 11th Infantry Division with elements north of the Ranwanduz - Rayat road; and the 7th Infantry Division advancing from its bases at Sulaimaniyah towards the border between Penjwin and Sayid Sadiq.

Ahead of Operation Dawn-4, units of the 1st Corps spent two months in their trenches waiting for the Iranians to attack. The offensive came on 19 October 1983 as the Iranians and Peshmerga guerrillas of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan took 250 sqmi of territory. This included a number of Kurdish villages and exerted a significant amount of pressure on Penjwin. Saddam Hussein responded with a counterattack, using the Iraqi Republican Guard and poison gas. However, they failed to dislodge the Iranians, who were dug-in and reinforced by Kurdish fighters.

The anti-Kurdish Anfal campaign was mounted between February and September 1988. While the Anfal campaign may have been initially conceived by the Iraqi government as a purely military campaign to destroy an insurgent movement, Kurds were killed for being Kurds, and it became ethnicised. The 1st Corps, under Lt. Gen. Sultan Hashem, at Kirkuk, handled most Anfal operations, alongside the 5th Corps.

Units were transferred south out of the 1st Corps to build up Iraqi forces in the south after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In early 2003 before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it was located near Kirkuk, consisting of the 5th Mechanized Division, 2nd Infantry Division, 8th Infantry Division and the 38th Infantry Division.

The corps was battered by the U.S. Task Force Viking (CJSOTF-North) during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Among other actions, U.S.-led forces seized Kirkuk. The successful occupation of Kirkuk came as a result of approximately two weeks of fighting that included the Battle of the Green Line (the unofficial border of the Kurdish autonomous zone) and the subsequent Battle of Kani Domlan Ridge (the ridgeline running northwest to southeast of Kirkuk), the latter fought exclusively by 3rd Battalion, 10th SFG and Kurdish peshmerga against the 1st Corps.

Remnants of the corps lasted until the dissolution of the Iraqi Army by Coalition Provisional Authority Order 2 in May 2003.