Iraq

You can help!

There are a lot of things you can help with in Iraq, either in person or mapping remotely.

• Many major highways are missing. Connecting towns and villages to each other is still on the to do list.
• Very few waterways are drawn, including the major ones.
• Huge amount of villages are marked as multiple points and require deduplication.

Highway/Roads classification in Iraq

1- highway = motorway

• ( M1 ) Motorway 1 . Near Kuwait Border- Baghdad- Jordan Border (Iraq) Mashreq international road
• ( 31 ) Motorway 31 . Basra- M1 Junction (Iraq)
• ( M88 ) Motorway 88 . Route 2 junction - Syria Border (Iraq)
• ( M90 ) Motorway 90 . Erbil - Duhok (Iraq)
• ( M120 ) Motorway 120 . Erbil Ring Road (Iraq)
• ( M150 ) Motorway 150 . Erbil Ring Road (Iraq)

2- highway = trunk

Numbers 1-12 radiate in clockwise order from Baghdad .

• Highway 1: Baghdad, Taji, Samarra, Tikrit, Mosul, Syria (Kameshli).
• Highway 2: Baghdad, Baqubah, Al Khalis, Kirkuk, Irbil, Mosul, Dohuk, Zakhu, Turkey (Silopi).
• Highway 3: Erbil to Iran (Piranshahr).
• Highway 4: Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, Darbinadikhan, Jalaulah, As Sa'Diyah.
• Highway 5: Baqubah, Muqdadiyah, As Sa'Diyah, Khanaqin, Iran (Qasr-e Shirin).
• Highway 6: Baghdad, Al Kut, Al Amarah, Basrah.
• Highway 7: Al Kut, Ash Shatrah, Nasiriyah.
• Highway 8: Baghdad, Al Hillah, Al-Qādisiyyah, As Samawah, Nasiriyah, Basrah, Kuwait.
• Highway 9: Karbala, Al Najaf, Al-Qādisiyyah.
• Highway 10: Al Rutbah, Jordan.
• Highway 11: Baghdad, Al Fallujah, Al Ramadi, Al Rutbah, Syria.
• Highway 12: Al Ramadi, Hīt, Haditha, Al-Karābilah, Syria (Abu Kamal).

Boundaries (proposal)

Place names (proposal for handling multiple names and multiple languages)

Many of the placenames have been renamed once or more over the last decades. It is common in official sources to refer to such as New Placename (Old Placename).

It is common for the same name to be recycled and applied for multiple places (villages, city quarters/suburbs), however usually not within the same governorate.

There are cases where a village or a city quarter is named according to origin of people inhabiting it, so there may be a quarter in a city called after another governorate, district, or a city.

There are multiple languages used in Iraq. Two official languages are Arabic and Central Kurdish (Sorani), both written in Arabic script. In many pockets of various ethnic groups additional languages are used: Syriac/Neo-Aramaic ('suret' - locally referred to as 'christian language') which uses Syriac script, Azeri ('Turkomen') in Latin and Arabic scripts, Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) in Arabic and Latin scripts, and others. In areas of mixed ethnicities it is common for a village or town to have a name in each of multiple languages - often these names sound completely different, so they are not the same names in multiple scripts. City and street name signs throughout the country often feature Latin transcriptions of those, usually inconsistent - meaning the same name can be spelled differently on various signs (e.g. Sulaymaniya, Sulemaniyah, Slemani).

The OSM's very flexible data model can be used to accommodate all of these. Here is an example town with multiple name tags, including various transliterations:

Quality control

• Quality control with Osmose