1950–1951 Baghdad bombings

The 1950–1951 Baghdad bombings were a series of bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad, Iraq, between April 1950 and June 1951.

There is a controversy around the true identity and objective of the culprits behind the bombings, and the issue remains unresolved.

Two activists in the Iraqi Zionist underground were found guilty by an Iraqi court for a number of the bombings, and were sentenced to death. Another was sentenced to life imprisonment and seventeen more were given long prison sentences. The allegations against Israeli agents had "wide consensus" amongst Iraqi Jews in Israel. Many of the Iraqi Jews in Israel who lived in poor conditions blamed their ills and misfortunes on the Israeli Zionist emissaries or Iraqi Zionist underground movement. The theory that "certain Jews" carried out the attacks "in order to focus the attention of the Israel Government on the plight of the Jews" was viewed as "more plausible than most" by the British Foreign Office. Telegrams between the Mossad agents in Baghdad and their superiors in Tel Aviv give the impression that neither group knew who was responsible for the attack.

Israeli involvement has been consistently denied by the Israeli government, including by a Mossad-led internal inquiry, even following the 2005 admission of the Lavon affair.

Those who assign responsibility for the bombings to an Israeli or Iraqi Zionist underground movement suggest the motive was to encourage Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel, as part of the ongoing Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Those historians who have raised questions regarding the guilt of the convicted Iraqi Zionist agents with respect to the bombings note that by 13 January 1951, nearly 86,000 Jews had already registered to immigrate, and 23,000 had already left for Israel, that the British who were closely monitoring the Jewish street did not even mention the bombs of April and June 1950, nor were they mentioned in the Iraqi trials, meaning these were minor events. They have raised other possible culprits such as a nationalist Iraqi Christian army officer, and those who have raised doubt regarding Israeli involvement claimed that it is highly unlikely the Israelis would have taken such measures to accelerate the Jewish evacuation given that they were already struggling to cope with the existing level of Jewish immigration. In 2023 Avi Shlaim, an historian of Jewish-Iraqi background, concluded on the basis of recollections one of the original participants in the Iraqi Zionist underground confided to him in 2017, that Zionists had indeed been responsible for at least three of the five bombings.