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Near modern Nasiriyah, Abraham left the powerful city-state of Ur - now a few stone ruins in the sand - nearly 4000 years ago for the promised land, Canaan (now Israel). Abraham is central to all three faiths: to Jews he is the founding patriarch, to Christians the father of all who believe and to Muslims a major prophet. The faiths divide over which of his sons was the child of promise: Isaac (the Bible) or Ishmael (the Koran).
Not far from Ur sprang the next dynastic empire: Babylon, where the first systematic legal system was developed - the Code of Hammurabi (about 1700BC), which enshrined the authority of the state and guaranteed social justice.
The savage Assyrians ruled the region next. In the eighth century BC modern Israel was divided into Israel and Judah. In 721BC King Shalmaneser crushed Israel and, in an early case of ethnic cleansing, deported the 10 lost tribes of Israel to Assyria and resettled the devastated land with people from the east.
One can understand why the prophet Jonah needed a whale of a prod before he obeyed the Lord's command to preach repentance in the Assyrian capital of Ninevah, in northern Iraq. But when the Assyrians heeded him and put on sackcloth and ashes, Jonah was furious.
In the seventh century BC the Babylonians rose to the top again, building the fabled hanging gardens and sacking Jerusalem.
But in 539BC Iraq's great days ended, when Cyrus, with his Medes and Persians (from modern Iran), conquered Babylon. The book of Daniel recounts how the feasting Babylonian king of Belshazzar was dismayed by the writing on the wall on the night the city was sacked.
The region moved off centre-stage for a thousand years or so but reappeared with the rise of Islam.
Karbala, where the US marines this week engaged the Republican Guards, was in 680 the site of one of the most important battles in Islamic history - a dispute over the succession to the Prophet Muhammad that divided Islam into Sunni and Shiite.
Karbala is home to the tomb of the prophet's grandson, Hussein, and nearby Najaf, also a battleground this week, has the tomb of Ali, the prophet's son-in-law. The two sites are sacred to Shiite Muslims.
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