Iraq Emoji

🇮🇶 the Iraq flag emoji is three horizontal bands, red, white and black, with green Arabic writing across the white band. Like every country flag emoji it is not a picture stored in Unicode but two regional indicator symbols, 🇮 and 🇶, for Iraq's country code IQ, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font, so there you see the letters IQ, while the person you send them to still sees the flag on their phone. Where flags don't show, people write the colours instead: ❤️🤍🖤, or 🟥⬜⬛ with 💚 for the writing.

The writing is the takbir, الله أكبر (Allāhu akbar, "God is the greatest"), split into الله and أكبر on either side of the centre. It was added in January 1991, during the Gulf War, in a script said to be Saddam Hussein's own handwriting. The current flag dates from 2008: it dropped the three green stars that had stood in the white band since 1963; the takbir had already been changed unofficially to angular Kufic script in 2004. Searches for an "old Iraq flag emoji" or the "Ba'athist" flag with stars come up empty, because Unicode has only one flag per country code and it always shows the flag the country uses today.

Red, white, black and green are the pan-Arab colours of the 1916 Arab Revolt flag, which is why 🇮🇶 sits in a family with Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Sudan. 🦅 stands for the Eagle of Saladin on Iraq's coat of arms. Iraq's 2024 census counted about 46 million people.

Iraqi dinar symbol: IQD and د.ع

The Iraqi dinar has no currency sign of its own in Unicode. In English it is written IQD (IQD 25,000), and in Arabic د.ع: dal and ayn, short for دينار عراقي (Iraqi dinar), with a full stop between them. That is the "ع د" people type when searching, because the letters appear in that order on a left-to-right screen. To write it, copy د, a full stop and ع from the grid; Arabic runs right to left, so د ends up on the right.

The current dinar dates from 2003, and its notes run up to 50,000 dinars. Prices are large numbers, since a US dollar is around 1,500 dinars at the official rate set in October 2026, and coins are hardly seen, so everyday money is paper 💵. US dollars are common for cars, rent and other big purchases. 💰 and 💵 are the emoji people put next to a price.

Arabic letters and Iraqi words

Arabic is one of Iraq's two official languages, and by CLDR's estimate the language of about 29 million Iraqis. People speak Iraqi Arabic and write Modern Standard Arabic in the Arabic script: 28 letters written right to left; most join cursively and change form by context, though some do not join to the following letter. The grid groups them by shape: ب ت ث share one body and differ only in their dots, and so do ج ح خ, د ذ, ر ز, س ش, ص ض, ط ظ and ع غ. Hamza ء sits on its own or on a seat (أ إ آ ؤ ئ), ة ends most feminine words, and ى ends words like على. Paste ع ر ا ق one after another to form عراق; with the article ال it becomes العراق, Iraq.

When Iraqis write their own dialect in chats, they borrow two Persian letters for sounds standard Arabic does not write: گ for the hard g that Iraqi Arabic uses for many words with ق (گلبي, galbi, my heart) and چ for ch (چاي, chai, tea). Other words you will see in every Iraqi comment section: شلونك (shlonak, how are you), اكو and ماكو (aku, there is, and maku, there isn't), زين (zein, good) and عيني (ʿeini, my eye, used like "dear").

To type Arabic on Windows, add the Arabic keyboard under Settings › Time & language › Language & region and switch with Windows+Space; on a Mac add Arabic under System Settings › Keyboard › Input Sources; on iPhone and Android add an Arabic keyboard and switch with the globe key. Arabic punctuation is turned to suit the script: the comma ، is upside down, the question mark ؟ is mirrored, the semicolon is ؛ and the percent sign is ٪. Eastern Arabic digits ٠١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩ are used on Iraqi banknotes and in Arabic text, and a number is still written largest place first, left to right: ٢٠٠٧ is 2007. The Arabic collection has the full alphabet with its vowel marks.

Kurdish letters (Sorani), Syriac and the Kurdistan flag emoji

Kurdish is Iraq's second official language, the language of the Kurdistan Region around Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok; CLDR estimates about 5 million speakers of Central Kurdish (Sorani) in Iraq. Sorani is written in the Arabic script with letters of its own: پ (p), چ (ch), ژ (zh), ڤ (v) and گ (g), and four letters marked with a small v: ڕ is a rolled r, ڵ a heavy, dark l, ێ a long ê and ۆ an ô. Unlike Arabic, Sorani writes most vowels with letters: ە for /æ/, ی for /iː/ and y, و for /ʊ/ and w, and ئ before a word-initial vowel; short /ɪ/ is usually unwritten. Kurds write the Persian forms ک and ی, not Arabic ك and ي; they look nearly the same but are distinct Unicode characters, so exact-text searches may not match the other form. Iraq in Kurdish is عێراق, and Kurdistan is کوردستان.

Windows has a Central Kurdish keyboard (add it under Language & region), and Gboard on Android offers Kurdish (Sorani). The Central Kurdish and Kurdish (Arabic) collections cover the alphabet in more depth, and Iran, where Sorani is also spoken, has its own page.

There is no Kurdistan flag emoji. Unicode's flags follow two-letter country codes, and the only regional flags it recommends are England, Scotland and Wales, so the red, white and green Kurdistan flag with its golden sun has no emoji. People write it as ❤️🤍💚☀️ or 🟥⬜🟩☀️, a sequence you will see all through Nowruz.

Syriac is another script used in Iraq. Many of Iraq's Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac Christians, in Baghdad, Mosul, the Nineveh Plains, Duhok and Ankawa near Erbil, speak forms of Neo-Aramaic and write the 22-letter Syriac alphabet ܐ ܒ ܓ ܕ, right to left like Arabic. CLDR puts Syriac speakers in Iraq at about 210,000, more than in any other country it lists. ♱ is the East Syriac cross of the Church of the East, and ⛪ is used for the country's old churches. Windows includes a Syriac keyboard; the Syriac collection has the vowel signs too. The constitution also recognises Turkmen in the areas where it is spoken; Iraq's Turkmen speech is close to Azerbaijani, which CLDR counts among Iraq's languages along with Persian and Northern Luri.

Ancient Iraq symbols: Mesopotamia, Babylon and cuneiform

Iraq is ancient Mesopotamia, "the land between the rivers" 🌊, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Writing began here: in Uruk in the south, around 3200 BC, scribes pressed wedge-shaped marks into wet clay, the script now called cuneiform. Unicode has encoded cuneiform since 2006, and the grid has five of its signs with their Sumerian meanings: 𒀭 AN, sky and god, 𒆠 KI, earth and place, 𒈗 LUGAL, king (literally "big man"), 𒂍 E, house or temple, and 𒌷 URU, city. Every sign has its own page here.

🦁🧱 is Babylon: lions striding along the blue glazed bricks of the Processional Way that led to the Ishtar Gate, and the basalt Lion of Babylon that still stands at the site near Hillah. 🐂🪽 is the lamassu, the winged bull with a human head that guarded Assyrian palaces at Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh. 🏺 is for the pottery and clay of Sumer, and 📜 for the law codes and epics, from Hammurabi's laws to the Epic of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Babylon became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019.

Later Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid caliphs and the city of the Thousand and One Nights, so 🧞 belongs here too, and ⛵ is Sinbad, who sets out on his voyages from Basra. Searches for "iraq national symbols" usually mean the flag, the Eagle of Saladin 🦅, the date palm 🌴 and the two rivers; "ancient iraq symbols" mean the lamassu, the lions and cuneiform.

Iraq emoji for food, places, football and holidays

🐟🔥 is masgouf, Iraq's best-known dish: a carp split open and grilled upright beside a wood fire, eaten along the Tigris on Baghdad's Abu Nuwas Street. 🍆🫑🧅🍅 is dolma, vegetables and vine leaves stuffed with rice, 🍚🍖 quzi, lamb on rice, and 🥘🍲 the stews served over rice every day, often sour with noomi basra, dried black lime 🍋‍🟩. Breakfast is eggs 🥚, broad beans 🫘, or kahi pastry with geymar, buffalo-milk cream 🥛, and date syrup 🍯. 🫓🍞 are flatbread and diamond-shaped samoon, 🥙🧆 falafel and shawarma with amba, a mango pickle 🥭, and 🍪 is kleicha, the date-filled cookie baked for Eid. Tea 🍵🫖 is drunk all day, strong and sweet, from small waisted glasses called istikan.

🌴 is the date palm, Iraq's tree: Iraq was long one of the world's great date producers, with tens of millions of palms in the 1970s. 🛶🐃🌾 is the southern marshes, with reed houses, water buffalo and narrow boats, a UNESCO site since 2016. ⛰️ is the mountains of Kurdistan, 🕌 the gold-domed shrines of Najaf, Karbala and Kadhimiya and the spiral minaret of Samarra, 🏰 the Erbil Citadel, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth, 🏙️🌉 Baghdad's bridges over the Tigris, and 📚✒️ Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad's booksellers' street, and the city's long tradition of calligraphy. 🛢️ is oil, which pays for most of the state.

⚽ is the national obsession. Iraq's team, the Lions of Mesopotamia, won the AFC Asian Cup in 2007 🏆, played at the 1986 World Cup, and won the Gulf Cup at home in Basra in 2023 🏟️. 🎲 is for tawla (backgammon) and dominoes in the cafés.

In Ramadan people send 🌙🤲 and رمضان كريم, and in the evenings play mheibes, a team game of hiding a ring 💍 in one player's fist. Eid al-Adha is 🐑, and Eid al-Fitr is عيد مبارك with 🍪 for kleicha. In Muharram many Iraqis post 🖤 for Ashura, and at Arbaeen millions walk 🚶 to Karbala. Nowruz on 21 March is the Kurdish new year, with bonfires 🔥 on the hills, dancing in long lines 💃🕺 and ❤️🤍💚☀️. National Day on 3 October marks independence in 1932: 🇮🇶🎆🎉.