Duhok

Population

350,000

Coordinates

36.867°, 42.950°

Region

Iraq

Views

A mountain city in northern Iraq, the capital of Kurdish Behdînan. It sleeps between green peaks; the Duhok river runs through its streets.

The city's history

Duhok

Duhok is an ancient Assyrian town known as Beth Nuhadra. It was formally founded in the nineteenth century under the Ottomans and grew rapidly in the twentieth. It was the seat of the powerful Kurdish Behdînan emirate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today it is the third largest city in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, with a respected university (University of Duhok) and the most important dam in Kurdistan (Duhok Dam), which supplies water and electricity. A quiet city set among mountains where Kurdistan's first ski resort rises.

On the map

Other cities in Iraq

Iraq

Hewlêr (Erbil)

The capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and the jewel of its broad plain. At its heart rises the Citadel, perched on an artificial mound that has accumulated six thousand years of continuous habitation upon itself — few cities on earth can contest its claim to be the oldest. Today Hewlêr is a modern capital of glass towers and shopping malls, yet the call to prayer from the citadel mosque still reminds you that history lies beneath your feet.

Population · 1,500,000

Iraq

Silêmanî (Sulaymaniyah)

The undisputed cultural capital of the Kurds. Silêmanî does not have thousands of years like Hewlêr; it is only two-hundred-and-forty years old. Yet those two-and-a-half centuries produced the greatest of modern Kurdish poetry, the first Kurdish newspapers, the most prominent Kurdish politicians, and the fiercest popular resistance to every dictatorship that ever ruled Iraq. It is the city of mountains, books, cafés, and poets.

Population · 800,000