al-Qa'im

Al-Qa'im is an Iraqi town located nearly 400 km northwest of Baghdad near the Syrian border and situated along the Euphrates River, and located in the Al Anbar Governorate. It has a population of about 150,000 and is the center of the Al-Qa'im District.The Al-Qa'im region has some of the richest soil in the Middle East. Beyond that, the river water at this point carries less salt and mineral, so that it takes significantly less water to sustainably produce crops here than farther downstream, where more gallon of water must be used to avoid salinity.Pre-war historyIn the early 20th century, there was a khan and police station in al-Qa'im, but no village. The khan was built in 1907 and was the residence of a local administrator. The surrounding area was inhabited by Arabs from the Karablah and Jara'if tribes.Al-Qa'im was reportedly the site of Iraq's refined uranium ore production from 1984 through 1990. The "Chemical Fertilizer Complex," as this was called, was originally built by Belgian contractors in January 1976, and by 1982 it was processing Phosphate from the nearby Akashat mine. That year, Iraq decided to build a uranium extraction facility on the same site, and hired Belgian contractors Mebshem to build the structure, completed in 1984. Unused uranium from al-Qa'im was stored in nearby Tuwaitha.The production facility was completely destroyed during a 1991 US bombing campaign during the Gulf War.Iraq WarIn the Iraq War, Qa'im was a center of attacks by the Iraqi insurgency against US military personnel at the nearby military base of Camp Gannon. The U.S. military regarded Qa'im as the entry point for foreign fighters into Iraq and viewed it as a strategically important point.