Tikrit

Tikrit is a city on the Tigris River in Iraq's Saladin Governorate, about 140 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, with roughly 160,000 residents as of 2012. Originally established as an Assyrian fort and later the birthplace of the medieval military leader Saladin around 1138, it became known as the cultural capital of Iraq's Sunni Arabs; captured by the Islamic State group in 2014, which massacred an estimated 1,700 captured Iraqi cadets at nearby Camp Speicher, it was retaken by Iraqi forces in 2015 after displacing some 28,000 civilians, and has remained peaceful since, home to the University of Tikrit, founded in 1987.