On Thursday, September 10, 2015, Dr. Haidar Saeed, researcher at the Arab Center, presented a lecture entitled "The Post-2003 Formation of the Sunni Political Elite in Iraq", as part of the weekly seminar series.Dr Haidar SaeedThe researcher addressed the issue of the Sunni political elite - in the contemporary contexts of post-2003 Iraqi state building- noting the lack of research on the Sunnis in Iraq as a group, contrary to the other Iraqi groups. He stressed that the history of the Sunnis in Iraq is the history of the Iraqi state itself, or in a sense, the history of Iraqi nationalism, with three generations of these Sunni elites. The first generation is made up of the elites that ruled Iraq in the royal era, who were originally part of the Ottoman bureaucracy or in the Ottoman army. The second generation was the Sunni military elite that emerged in the 1950s, who ruled ruled the country from 1958. The birth of the third generation of ruling Sunni elites emerged by the end of the 1970s, linked to a coup within the Baath party.