Ibrahim al-Marashi

Who is Ibrahim al-Marashi?

Dr. Ibrahim al-Marashi is an assistant professor at California State University, San Marcos researching modern Iraqi history. He holds a DPhil in History from Oxford University, where his thesis was on the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait.

He is best known as the author of an article which was plagiarised by the British government in a 2003 briefing document entitled Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation. This document was a follow-up to the earlier September Dossier, both of which concerned Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and were ultimately used by the government to justify its involvement in the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Large portions of al-Marashi's term paper were quoted verbatim by then United States Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. General Assembly.

The material plagiarised from Marashi's work and copied nearly verbatim into the "Dodgy Dossier" was six paragraphs from his article Iraq's Security & Intelligence Network: A Guide & Analysis, which was published in the September 2002 issue of the Middle East Review of International Affairs. Tony Blair's office ultimately apologised to Marashi for its actions, but not to the MERIA journal.