Ibn al-Ash'ath in the context of "Iraq (region)"

Abu Muhammad al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ibn al-Hakam ibn Abi Aqil al-Thaqafi (c. 661–714), known simply as al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, was a governor who served the Umayyad Caliphate. He began his service under Caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), who successively promoted him as the head of the Caliph's shurta (select troops), the governor of the Hejaz (western Arabia) in 692–694, and the practical viceroy of a unified Iraqi province and the eastern parts of the Caliphate in 694. Al-Hajjaj retained the last post under Abd al-Malik's son and successor al-Walid I (r. 705–715), whose decision-making was heavily influenced by al-Hajjaj, until his death in 714.

As governor of Iraq and the east, al-Hajjaj instituted key reforms. Among these were the minting of silver dirhams with strictly Muslim religious formulas instead of the coins' traditional, pre-Islamic Sasanian design; changing the language of the diwan (tax registers) of Iraq from Persian to Arabic. To revive agricultural production and increase tax revenue, al-Hajjaj expelled non-Arab, Muslim converts from the garrison cities of Kufa and Basra to their villages of origin and collected from them the jizya (poll tax) nominally reserved for non-Muslim subjects, and oversaw large-scale canal digging projects. In 701, al-Hajjaj, with reinforcements from Syria, crushed a mass rebellion led by the Kufan Arab nobleman Ibn al-Ash'ath whose ranks spanned the Arab troops, Muslim converts and religious elites of Iraq. Consequently, al-Hajjaj further tightened control over the province, founding the city of Wasit to house the loyalist Syrian troops whom he thereafter relied on to enforce his rule.