The Persian Gulf state of Iraq received the first of more than 800 Soviet 8K11, or R-11 or SS-1b "Scud" 300 km range ballistic missiles in the late 1970s-early 1980s.
On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded its eastern neighbor of Iran and started what was known at the time as the "Gulf War". During that war western nations more or less openly took the side of Iraq, helping  in several different ways. In particular, the US DIA and CIA agencies are known to have given Iraq high resolution images of Iranian military targets taken by Keyhole spy satellites during the conflict. Iraq is also presumed to to have received huge financial supports from the US through the Atlanta branch of the Italian BNL (Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, National Labour Bank) bank.
According to Iraqi officials, Iraq started a national program to develop missiles in 1982, initially concentrating on artillery rockets. Longer range projects were also started, aimed at producing a missile able to reach Teheran, the Iranian capital, some 600 km from the Iraqi border. Iraq also joined Egypt and Argentine in the Condor-2 project, to produce a two staged solid fueled ballistic missile able to deliver a payload of approximately 500 kg over a range of 750 km. For the Condor-2 project, also known as Badr-200 Iraq assembled a team of foreign engineers from several countries. Engineers from Brazil, West Germany and Italy are known to have joined the project. In addition, Iraq purchased high technology production tools from abroad.
In March 1986 Iran launched its first Scud missiles on the Iraqi capital Baghdad, sparking an Iraqi crash program to increase the range of Scud missiles to 600 km, in order to reach Teheran. Development was undertaken (mainly by West German engineers) by the Surface-to-Surface Missile Research and Development Team headed by Amir Al Saadi, which operated under the authority of the Iraqi Industry and Military Industrialization Ministry headed by president Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamal. The resulting Al Hussein missile was first tested on August 3, 1987 and was later existensively used both during the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War of 1991.
In the late 1980s the Iraqi became aware of the existence of an Israeli project to launch satellites using the national Shavit launcher, based on the Jericho-2 missile. This apparently sparked a new crash program to create a national space launcher to launch the first national satellite, compounded by the fact that the US were probably to cease supplying spy satellite intelligence data after the war with Iran ceased in 1989. The obvious choice would have been a launcher based on the Condor-2, but that program had suffered fatal blows with West Germany and Italy signing the Missile Technology Control Regime treaty in April 1987, meaning that they had to withdraw personnel from Iraq and with Abdel Kader Helmy, one of the key managers of the project being arrested in the US in July 1988. Iraq thus settled on another version of the old, but well known and reliable Scud missile.
In November 1987 Iraq contacted one of the Western top ballistic experts, Canadian-born Gerald Bull, who eventually flew to Baghdad on January 15, 1988 to meet with Hussein Kamal and Amir Al Saadi. There, he was briefed on Iraqi projects for reconstruction after the war, which included of course launching satellites. Al Saadi revealed that Iraqi, Egyptian and Brazialian engineers were working on a three staged rocket based on Scud technology but that they were having several technical problems in areas as diverse as metallurgy, thermal and structural analysis and flight dynamics. Bull agreed to provide consultancy on such topics trough Bull's Brussel's based Space Research Corporation (SRC). A voice maintains that simulations for Iraqi missiles were also carried out between 1988 and 1990 on the Cray supercomputers of the US Army Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland.
Bull also proposed the use of a very large gun, modeled after the gun studied by Bull himself for US Army's project HARP of the Sixties to launch smaller satellites.
During a subsequent visit to Iraq in mid 1988 Bull was taken by Al Saadi himself to Saad 16, a top secret laboratory in nothern Iraq near Mosul where work on long range missiles was being carried out. In addition to Condor-2 and the satellite launcher work was also being carried out on an intermediate range ballistic missile, that was to be used as the carrier of the Iraqi atomic bomb. This missile used an enlarged and stretched 100 cm diameter Scud (designated S100 in SRC documents) as the first stage and a solid fueled second stage. This missile was to have a payload bay of some 1.25 m diameter and a range (with a 1 tonne atomic warhead) of 1,200 km, being able to strike almost anywhere in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. According to the UN work on the S100 engine did not start until 1989 and development was expected to be completed in 1993.
Its is not clear how much of the design of the launcher originated in Iraq. SRC at the time produced at least two reports on the project, that were later discovered by United Nation officials monitoring the destruction of the Iraqi missile power; the first was titled "Preliminary Proposal for a Satellite Launcher Using Clustered Scud Rockets" and the second "Project Bird", this being the internal SRC codename of the whole project. Four different versions were studied, using bundled standard 80 cm diameter Scuds (called S80), enlarged and stretched S100s and a purpose built third stage.
The first version, named "Configuration A" in the report used four S80 as the first stage, strapped around a single S100 second stage in a way reminiscent of the Soviet R-7 ICBM, and a 2.2 meters long 1,000 kg mass third stage. The second version, "Configuration B" used five instead of four S80 as the first stage, the third version used six S80 as the first stage and the fourth more powerful version used six S80 as the first stage, two side by side S100 as the second stage and the usual purpose built third stage.

Judging from Iraqi Tv footage, Configuration A, the simplest and less powerful version or Configuration B was chosen and the engine of a Lavochkin SA-2 surface to air missile was reportedly designated as the third stage. However, a biography of Gerald Bull states that the first stage was made of five Scuds, the second stage was powered by two Scud motors, and the third stage was of Brazilian design and, according to Bull, unreliable. To improve things, Bull had apparently suggested that he might try to obtain a Chinese solid fueled motor as the third stage.
The belief that Configuration A or B was used, no matter what the origins of the third stage were, is however compounded by the fact that the Brazilian Vehiculo Lancador de Satellites (satellite launch vehicle), designed during the same years and flown unsuccessfully in the late-1990s shares the very same architecture with Configuration A.
In this configuration the rocket, named "al Abid" (the Worshipper), weighted 48 tons, was some 17 meters tall and had a lift-off thrust of 70 tons. It was capable to put a satellite weighting some 150 kg in low Earth orbit. SRC and Bull also helped the Iraqi with warhead and satellite fairing design for their missiles and launchers, to the point that they tried unsuccessfully to acquire the Northern Irish factory where the all-composite Learfan executive airplane was expected to be built.

In the meantime a prototype al Abid rocket was prepared on the launch pad. It consisted of a "live" first stage and dummy second and third stage and was designed to test guidance and control of the first stage only. In particular, roll control of the missile bundle could be problematic and had to be tested in flight.
A launch pad for al Abid was built west of Baghdad at 33,5 degrees North, 43 degrees East, from which satellites could be launched on orbits with inclinations between 34 and 50 degrees. The lowest inclination meant that the missile's ground track would have passed just north of the outskirts of Baghdad, but I can't find any such geographical reason for the 50 degrees constrain.
The launch pad was called al Anbar, although this name is that of a vast region of Iraq that comprises all of the desert west of Baghdad to the Jordanian border. My opinion is that the launch pad was part of the al Habbaniyah air base.
 

The ground tracks of a launcher departing from a launchpad at 33,5 degrees North, 43 degrees East on orbits with inclinations between 34 and 50 degrees. The 34 degrees inclination orbit track passes just north of Baghdad. The al Abid launchpad was possibly part of the al Habbaniyah air base. (CIA map)

On December 5, 1989 the al Abid prototype was fired, flying for 130 seconds and reaching a maximum altitude of some 25 km.
On December 7 the launch was announced by Hussein Kamal who also noted that a military missile, named Tammuz and having a maximum range of some 2,000 km was under development. This was probably the S100+SA-2 project.
As a CIA report of the time noted, an al Abid based ballistic missile would make for an unlikely ballistic missile, since its launch facilities would be exposed to air attack and its fueling would take hours to complete.
The day after the Iraqi announcement the US State Department acknowledged the launch and it was even incorrectly reported that NORAD had tracked three objects in space after the launch, apparently confirming that the Iraqi rocket had put something in space. Looking at the records of every object ever tracked in space, however, it is possible that the three objects were a debris from the Soviet Granat astronomical satellite, launched four days earlier, a debris from the US Nimbus 4, launched in 1970 and a debris from a Soviet Meteor satellite launched in 1978. However, the myth of an Iraqi satellite was born.
Just a few months after the December launch it was announced that al Abid would soon be used to launch two different types of "non-military science satellites". Of course, spy satellites were also under study.
In the end, two events led to the cancellation of the program: Gerald Bull was shot dead in Brussel in March 1990, by killers that probably were Israeli Mossad intelligence service agents and the defeat in the Gulf War of 1991 meant that Iraq had to loose all of its missilistic arsenal with more than 150 km range, including "peaceful" vehicles such as al Abid. The al Abid launch pad itself was one of the early targets of US strikes in January 1991.
Hussein Kamil was killed in the mid-1990s when he reentered Iraq after having defected. His place was taken by Amir Al Saadi, who surrendered to US forces in mid April 2003.
A low profile Iraqi spy satellite program was apparently still alive at least until 2002, despite the fact that no suitable launcher existed or could be expected any time soon. Documentation on an Earth imaging satellite was collected in December 22, 2002 during a three hour UN inspection at Al Battanee Baghdad Space Research and Development Center.

Related Links:
Gunter's space page: Tammuz

Bibliography 
Carus, W.S., Bermudez, J.S. Jr: Iraq's Al-Husayn Missile Programme, Jane's Intelligence Review, Vol. 2, No. 5, May 1990
FAS Internet Page
Global Security al Abid page (includes Iraqi television footage of the only Al Abid Launch)
Iraqi Space Launch more Modest than Claimed, Flight International, 20 December 1989, p. 4
Iraq Plans to Launch two Science Satellites, Flight International, 21 December 1990, p. 20
Iraq Launcher Designed by "Supergun" Inventor, Flight International, 13 January 1993, p. 18
Iraqi Ballistic Missile Development [DELETED], available on-line at the CIA FOIA site
Lowther, W: Arms and the Man, New York, Ballantine Books
Mac Farquhar, N.: For U.N. Labor of Hercules, a Talk- and Walk-Through, The New York Times, 23 December 2002
Tonello, F.: Progetto Babilonia, Milan, Garzanti (In Italian)
Tyler, P.E.: Officiers say U.S. aided Iraq in war despite use of gas, The New York Times, 18 August 2002

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