Iraq was one of the original founding members, in 1945, of which organisation of Arab states?

The correct answer is the Arab League, formally the League of Arab States, founded in Cairo in 1945. Iraq was one of the original six founding members, alongside Egypt, Jordan (then Transjordan), Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria, with Yemen joining shortly afterward that same year, making the League one of the earliest and longest-running regional political organisations in the modern Arab world. Its core purpose was, and remains, to strengthen political, economic, cultural and social cooperation among Arab states and to coordinate their positions on matters of shared regional concern. This 1945 founding date is the key fact tested here, since it predates every other option by years or decades. OPEC, the first distractor, was founded much later, in 1960, as an oil-exporters' economic cartel; Iraq is indeed a founding member of OPEC too, but OPEC is an economic organisation focused on petroleum policy, not the 1945 pan-Arab political body the question describes. The Gulf Cooperation Council, the second distractor, was established even later, in 1981, and its membership is restricted to six Gulf Arab monarchies — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman — a group Iraq has never belonged to, since Iraq is a republic and lies outside this defined Gulf-monarchy bloc. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the fourth distractor, was founded in 1969 and is a much broader religious-political body of Muslim-majority states worldwide, not a specifically Arab regional organisation, and while Iraq is a member, it was not founded in 1945. A common exam confusion is assuming Iraq's OPEC and Arab League memberships are the same fact, or wrongly placing Iraq inside the GCC because of its Gulf-adjacent geography.