Siege of Baghdad by the Ottomans

1638

Sultan Murad IV, the last Ottoman sultan to lead an army in person, besieged Baghdad for forty days and wrested it from Safavid Persia in a blood-soaked final assault. The Treaty of Zuhab that followed drew the Ottoman-Persian frontier roughly where the Iraq-Iran border stands today, a line scratched in seventeenth-century gunpowder.