
Sadr City, formerly known as al-Thawra or Saddam City, is a Shia suburb and administrative district of Baghdad, Iraq. It was built in 1959 by Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim to deal with housing shortages in Baghdad, housing Baghdad's urban poor (including many rural migrants). It became a stronghold of the Iraqi Communist Party, and it was renamed "Saddam City" in 1982 in honor of the Ba'athist dictator Saddam Hussein. It continued to be a center of poverty and communist organizing under Ba'athist Iraq, and, in 2003, the district was unofficially renamed in honor of Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr following the invasion of Iraq. The district became a stronghold of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army during the Iraq War, and it was the site of the 2004-2008 Siege of Sadr City. By 2016, Sadr City was home to 1.5 million people.