Flag of Iraq

How to read it

Article 12 of Iraq’s constitution of 2005 leaves the flag, the national anthem and the emblem to be set by a law, in a way that symbolises the components of the Iraqi people. Iraq’s parliament voted for the present version on 22 January 2008, and Store norske leksikon gives 29 January 2008 as the day it was officially adopted: three horizontal stripes of equal width in red, white and black, from the top, with the takbir in green Kufic script on the white. It was meant as a temporary flag, at first for a year, until a permanent one was chosen. A competition for a new flag was announced in July 2008, but none of the 50 designs entered was adopted.

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The takbir and the stars that were dropped

The words on the flag are the takbir, the phrase “Allahu akbar”, “God is greatest”. The Norwegian encyclopedia Store norske leksikon records how they got there. From 1963 the white stripe carried three green stars, for Iraq, Egypt and Syria. In 1991 President Saddam Hussein added the takbir between the stars, in his own handwriting, and in 2004 the inscription was changed to Kufic script. The Christian Science Monitor reported in January 2008 that the background colours and the Kufic inscription stayed and the three stars went. The encyclopedia gives two reasons for dropping them: a strong wish of the country’s Kurdish minority, who disliked the pan-Arab symbolism, and the stars’ close ties to the Ba’ath regime.

Where the colours come from

Iraq has had seven flags since 1921, all in the pan-Arab colours, Store norske leksikon counts. It gives the traditional reading: black is said to have been the flag of the Prophet Muhammad and of the Abbasids, white the colour of the Rashidun caliphate and the Umayyads, green the Fatimids’ colour, and red the flag colour of the conquerors of North Africa and Andalusia. In modern times the colours first came together in the flag of the Arab Revolt, carried by Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, king of the Hejaz from 1916 to 1924; his sons became kings of Transjordan, Syria and Iraq, and all of them used versions of it. Under the monarchy, until 1958, Iraq’s flag had a red trapezium at the pole with two white stars, and black, white and green stripes.

Telling it from Egypt’s, Yemen’s and Syria’s old flag

The same red, white and black stripes are on three other flags. Egypt’s flag has the golden eagle of Saladin on the white, its constitution says. Yemen’s flag has the three stripes and nothing on them. Syria’s flag from 1980 to 2024 had two green five-pointed stars on the white, as its 2012 constitution described it. Only Iraq’s has writing: green Arabic letters, and no eagle or stars.