Tal Afar

Tal Afar (Arabic: تَلْعَفَر, romanized: Talʿafar, IPA: [talˈʕafar]; Turkish: Telafer, تلعفر) is a city in the Nineveh Governorate of northwestern Iraq, located 63 km (39 mi) west of Mosul, 52 km (32 mi) east of Sinjar and 200 km (120 mi) northwest of Kirkuk. Its local inhabitants are exclusively Turkmens.

While no official census data exists, the city, which had previously been estimated to have a population of approximately 200,000, had dropped to 80,000 as of 2007. In 2003, Tal Afar's Turkmen population in the city center was about 55 percent Shia, while 45 percent was Sunni. On 27 April 2025, Baghdad Today reported of an ongoing government initiative to convert Tal Afar District into the 20th governorate of Iraq. The proposed name of the new governorate is Jazira.

History

Prehistory

10 kilometres (6.2 mi) southwest of the town of Tal Afar are the mounds of Yarim Tepe which yielded remains from the Halafian culture of the Hassuna, Halaf and Ubaid periods, between 7000 and 4500 BC.

Assyrian Empire

From perhaps the 5th century BC through to the 7th century AD it was an integral part of Assyria.

Ottoman Empire

The British military officer and traveler Frederick Forbes, who journeyed through northern Mesopotamia in the early 19th century, described Tal Afar in his 1838 travel account:There is no bazar or market-place in the town, and only a few shops, such as those of the blacksmith, carpenter, and tanner; the latter is the only Christian inhabitant, all the others being Musulmans, a mixture of Arabs and Kurds. The language generally spoken is Kurdish, but Arabic is also commonly understood.The English traveller, archaeologist, and future diplomat Austen Henry Layard—one day to become the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire—wrote in his book 1867 book Nineveh and Its Remains:

Tel Afer was once a town of some importance; it is mentioned by the early Arab geographers, and may perhaps be identified with the Telassar of Isaiah, referred to, as it is, in connection with Gozan and Haran. It has been three times besieged, within a few years, by Ali Pasha of Baghdad, Hafiz Pasha, and Injeh Bairakdar Mohammed Pasha.