Tal Afar

Tal Afar is a town and district in the Nineveh Governorate of northwestern Iraq, sixty three km west of Mosul, fifty two km east of Sinjar and 2 hundred km north west of Kirkuk. While no professional census records exists, the city which were assessed to have a populace of about 2 hundred,000, had dropped to 80,000, as of 2007, almost all of whom are Iraqi Turkmen. In Tal Afar itself, the population is in the main Turkmen, about 75 percentage of whom had been Sunni Muslims, while 1 / 4 have been Shi’ites.

While maximum citizens can speak Arabic, the Iraqi Turkmen/Turkoman dialect of the Turkish language, is the maximum common language used at some stage in the town. Tal Afar, together with Altun Kupri, Amirli, Bashir, Bustamli, Mahalabiyah, Qarah Tabbah, Sulaiman Bek, Taza Khurmatu, Tuz Khurmatu and Yankjah, make up the biggest Turkmen-majority towns in Iraq, even as Mosul, Kirkuk, Kifri, Daquq, Miqdadiyah, Jalawla and Saadiyah have sizeable Turkmen minority populations. This metropolis was captured through Islamic State in 2014 however the Iraqi army recaptured it in 2017.