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About the archive

“همر” is a research database of the archive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq under the U.S. occupation in 2003 and 2004, holding its orders, regulations and statements in Arabic and English.

The site holds 6,619 documents from 7,183 files. The CPA’s own archive: 4,503 documents in 17 categories (April 2003 – June 2004) from 4,863 files; 4,715 of them from the original archive copy and 148 added from the companion sources (further captures of the CPA website and the Dorar al-Iraq Arabic texts). The companion sources: 2,116 documents from 2,320 files in 9 sections (see below).

Sources

The University of North Texas Libraries (CyberCemetery, govinfo.library.unt.edu/cpa-iraq) and the Internet Archive (web.archive.org) copies of cpa-iraq.org. Each file’s original link and SHA-256 fingerprint are listed under “Technical details” on its document page.

How it was made

  • Digital text is extracted directly from PDF files; scanned files and most Arabic files are read with the optical character recognition built into macOS.
  • The official date of orders, regulations and memoranda is taken from their code in the text (CPA/ORD/…); where that was not possible the date is marked “approximate”.
  • Search ignores Arabic diacritics, normalizes hamzas, tā’ marbūṭa and yā’, and finds words with their prefixes and suffixes.
  • The “legal status today” of each order awaits human legal review.

Personal data

Some documents contain personal data, including lists of detainees with their names, dates of birth and addresses. These documents are marked “sensitive”. On this site each one appears in its section as a locked card, without its text or file; access is by request for research purposes.

Companion sources

Alongside the CPA archive, the site holds documents from other bodies that wrote about or dealt with the Coalition Provisional Authority, in separate sections so that it stays clear what comes from the CPA’s own archive and what comes from elsewhere:

For each of their files, “Technical details” on its page lists the original link, the archived capture and its date where there is one, the retrieval date, the rights statement as given by the source, and its SHA-256 fingerprint. Arabic texts of the 27 orders with no Arabic text in the archive were transcribed from the Dorar al-Iraq legal wiki; they appear on the orders’ pages with a note on their source. The “Interviews and testimonies” section lists the interviews with links to their publishers, without their texts or files, as the publication rights belong to the publishers.