article: Now it is being talked about a lot again, because there is a battle taking place over a city called Mosul. Mosul is currently under the control of a group that calls itself Islamic State (IS), but Iraqi soldiers want to take it back off them. IS have extreme religious beliefs and use brutal violence against anyone who doesn't agree with their views. They're trying to take control of areas of the Middle East, forcing people to live by very strict rules. An army of around 50,000 troops is involved in the operation to take Mosul from the IS soldiers in the city. The people battling against IS are made up of many different groups who all want to remove them from power. However, even though they are fighting together, some of the people in this group have different beliefs and disagree about how Iraq should be ruled. But they have joined together to fight IS. Some countries around the world are also helping them. The US government has said there could be as many as 5,000 IS soldiers in Mosul. It is likely to take a long time for Iraq to win the city back from IS. But why is this fight significant? And where did all this conflict in Iraq come from? Newsround explains where this situation started, who is involved, and what it means for the people who live in the country. The problems in Iraq have gone on for a long time. Back in 2003, British and US troops went to war in Iraq to remove the leader of the country, Saddam Hussein, from power. Leaders of these countries said at the time that this needed to happen because he was a dangerous man who treated the people in his country very badly. They also said they believed he was hiding extremely dangerous weapons. Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003 and killed three years later. The decision to go to war in Iraq was a controversial one. None of the dangerous weapons that the US and UK leaders said they believed Saddam Hussein had were ever found. This led to an investigation, which you can read about here. Removing Iraq's leader from power was supposed to be quite a simple mission, but it turned into a long war that lasted eight years. This was because after Saddam Hussein was no longer in charge, there were many people fighting for power in the country. In 2009, British forces stopped fighting there and the US followed by the end of 2011. More than 4,500 US troops died in the Iraq war and 179 UK soldiers lost their lives. Everybody hoped that Iraq would be able to recover on its own after the conflict. However, this didn't happen. Most people in Iraq are Muslim, but they belong to different types of the religion. Some are Shia Muslims and some are Sunni Muslims. These two groups disagree about how the country should be run. The government in Iraq is Shia, while IS soldiers claim to be Sunni Muslims - although other Sunni
summary: Iraq is a country in the Middle East that has been in the news for many years because of fighting there.