Iraq borders six countries: Iran to the east, Turkey to the north, Syria to the north-west, Jordan to the west, Saudi Arabia to the south-west and Kuwait to the south. Its land borders total about 3,809 km. The longest is with Iran (1,599 km) and the shortest with Jordan (179 km). Iraq also has a very short coastline, about 58 km, at the head of the Persian Gulf. Almost every one of these borders was drawn in the 1920s under British and French influence, and almost every one has since been fought over.
| Neighbour | Border length | Main crossing |
|---|---|---|
| Iran | 1,599 km | Mehran, Shalamcheh |
| Saudi Arabia | 811 km | Arar |
| Syria | 599 km | Al-Qaim–Abu Kamal, Rabia |
| Turkey | 367 km | Ibrahim Khalil (Habur) |
| Kuwait | 254 km | Safwan–Abdali |
| Jordan | 179 km | Trebil–Karameh |
Lines Drawn in the 1920s
Iraq was created out of three Ottoman provinces, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, placed under a British mandate after the First World War. Most of its borders were fixed within a few years. The 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement between Britain and France is often blamed for the region's borders, but Iraq's lines owe more to later deals. In 1922, at Uqair on the Gulf coast, the British official Sir Percy Cox drew Iraq's borders with Kuwait and the lands of Ibn Saud, the future Saudi Arabia, reportedly taking a red pencil to a map in front of the delegates. In 1926, after a League of Nations commission, a treaty with Turkey confirmed that the oil-rich province of Mosul belonged to Iraq. Only the Iranian border, following the Zagros mountains, has much older roots, in treaties between the Ottoman and Persian empires going back to 1639.
Iran: The Longest and Most Contested Border
The 1,599 km border with Iran runs from the mountains of Kurdistan in the north, along the foothills of the Zagros, to the marshes and the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the south. The Shatt al-Arab, called the Arvand Rud in Iran, is the channel formed where the Tigris and Euphrates meet, and it has been the most disputed stretch. A 1937 treaty gave Iraq almost the whole waterway. Under the 1975 Algiers Agreement the border was moved to the deepest line of the channel. In September 1980 Saddam Hussein tore up that agreement and invaded Iran, starting a war that lasted until 1988, killed hundreds of thousands of people and left the border where it had begun.
Today the Iran border is Iraq's busiest. Millions of Iranian pilgrims cross it each year, above all for Arbaeen, the forty-day commemoration after Ashura, when crowds walk to the shrine of Imam Husayn at Karbala. The southern marshes that straddle the border, drained under Saddam in the 1990s and partly restored since, are covered in our guide to the Mesopotamian Marshes. The border from the Iranian side is described in our guide to the countries that border Iran.
Turkey: Mountains, Kurds and Rivers
The 367 km border with Turkey crosses high, rugged mountains inhabited on both sides by Kurds. The main crossing, Ibrahim Khalil, known as Habur on the Turkish side, lies in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq and is one of the busiest commercial crossings in the Middle East. At the western end of this border, near Faysh Khabur, the Tigris flows past the point where Iraq, Syria and Turkey meet. For decades Turkey has carried out military operations and built bases on the Iraqi side against the Kurdish militant group PKK, which announced in 2025 that it would disband.
The border matters for water as much as security. Both the Tigris and the Euphrates rise in Turkey, and Turkish dams built since the 1970s, including the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates and the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris, completed in 2018, have reduced and regulated the flow reaching Iraq. Water shortage, made worse by drought, is now one of Iraq's most serious problems.
The Kurdistan Region's Own Frontier
Iraq's northern borders with Turkey and Iran, and part of its border with Syria, run through the Kurdistan Region, which has governed itself since the early 1990s, when a Western no-fly zone protected it from Saddam's forces. The 2005 constitution recognised the Kurdistan Regional Government, which runs its own security forces, the Peshmerga, and manages its own border posts and airports at Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. In September 2017 the region held an independence referendum in which about 93 per cent voted yes. Baghdad responded by retaking the oil city of Kirkuk and other disputed areas the Kurds had held, and by closing the region's airports to international flights for several months. The status of the disputed territories along the region's edge, including Kirkuk and Sinjar, has never been settled.
Syria: A Desert Line ISIS Erased
The 599 km border with Syria runs across open desert, drawn by Britain and France between their mandates. The Euphrates crosses it at Abu Kamal and Al-Qaim, and tribes whose members live on both sides have always moved across it. In June 2014, as the Islamic State group swept across northern Iraq, its fighters bulldozed a section of the border berm and filmed themselves declaring "the end of Sykes–Picot". The group was driven out of its last territory in both countries by 2019, and the border has been restored, but it remains porous and closely watched.
Jordan: The Road to the Mediterranean
Iraq's shortest border, 179 km with Jordan, carries one of its most important roads, the highway from Baghdad through the desert to Amman and on to the Jordanian port of Aqaba. For years, when Iraq was under UN sanctions after 1990, the Trebil–Karameh crossing, more than 500 km west of Baghdad, was one of its few lifelines to the outside world. Plans for a pipeline carrying Iraqi oil to Aqaba have been discussed for decades.
Saudi Arabia: The Vanished Neutral Zone
The 811 km border with Saudi Arabia crosses the empty stony desert of the Syrian Desert and the Najd. Percy Cox's 1922 settlement included an odd feature: a diamond-shaped neutral zone of about 7,000 km² between the two countries, where Bedouin from both sides could graze and water their herds freely. It was formally divided between the two states under agreements concluded in 1975 and 1981. Relations were broken for years after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and the main land crossing, at Arar, reopened only in November 2020, after thirty years.
Kuwait: The Border That Started a War
Iraq's 254 km border with Kuwait, and the question of whether Kuwait should be Iraqi at all, has caused more trouble than any other. Iraqi governments argued that Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman province of Basra. In 1961, when Kuwait became independent, Iraq's leader Abd al-Karim Qasim claimed it, and British troops were sent to deter an invasion. In August 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait, partly over oil production from the Rumaila field, which straddles the border. A US-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces in February 1991. A United Nations commission then demarcated the border, which Security Council Resolution 833 confirmed in 1993, placing it slightly north of the old line and giving Kuwait part of the town of Umm Qasr.
The sea boundary is still contested. A 2012 agreement on navigation in the Khor Abdullah channel, which leads to Iraq's ports, was ruled unconstitutional by Iraq's Federal Supreme Court in 2023, reopening an argument Kuwait considered settled. The same waterway matters to Iraq's plans for the large new port of Grand Faw. The story from Kuwait's side is in our guide to the countries that border Kuwait.
What Lies Within the Lines
Inside these borders, Iraq covers about 438,000 km², a little larger than California and nearly twice the size of the United Kingdom. Its heart is the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates, ancient Mesopotamia, where cities such as Ur, Uruk and Babylon rose more than four thousand years ago. Babylon became a World Heritage Site in 2019. The two rivers enter from Turkey and Syria, flow south-east, and join near Basra to form the Shatt al-Arab. The rest of the country is largely desert to the west and south-west, and mountains in the Kurdish north-east. In 2024 Iraq held its first nationwide census since 1987, which counted about 46 million people. Our guide to the Tigris follows the river that ties the country together.
A Nearly Landlocked Country
Iraq's 58 km of coast is one of the shortest of any country with a sea coast, and nearly all of it is mudflat and marsh around the Faw peninsula. Its only deep-water access is through channels that it shares with Kuwait and Iran, which is why so much of Iraqi history has turned on the Shatt al-Arab, Umm Qasr and Khor Abdullah. Most of Iraq's oil leaves through southern terminals near Basra. The alternative, a pipeline north to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, has been shut for long periods by war and legal disputes. Iraq has spent decades trying to secure better access to the sea while its neighbours hold most of the coastline around it.