The Iraqi-American National Network (IANN) is a project sponsored by the Free Iraq Foundation. The main aim of the IANN is to support, nurture and build the capacity of emerging Iraqi communities across the US. It aims to connect these rising organizations with each other and with senior, more established Iraqi organizations. The concept of the network has grown out of three years of strategic planning initiated by the Foundation?s Iraqi Community Organizations Program (ICOP), and has implemented ideas from other organizational models.
An estimated 40,000 Iraqi refugees have arrived in the United States since 1992 as a result of ongoing wars and political repression in their own country. The first wave of Iraqi refugees consisted primarily of single men who came through refugee camps in Saudi Arabia from 1992 to 1996. From 1996 to 1998, a second wave of refugees, mainly Kurdish families, immigrated from Northern Iraq.