Dhi Qar Governorate

Dhi Qar Governorate is one of the governorates, called muhafazat in Arabic, into which Iraq is divided, and its capital is the city of An-Nasiriyah. In the mid-twentieth century the same territory was the Muntafiq province, a name that was changed to Nasiriyah around 1962 and to Dhi Qar in February 1976; the spelling Thi-Qar is also used in English. Until about 1970 divisions of this kind were called liwa, when their status was changed to muhafazat. The 1997 census counted 1,184,796 people in the governorate, and the census of 25 November 2024 counted 2,499,468. The Statoids table of Iraqi provinces gives its area as 12,900 square kilometres. The governorate is one of eighteen first-level divisions of Iraq in that table.