Sulaymaniyah Governorate

Sulaymaniyah Governorate, written As-Sulaymaniyah in the Statoids tables and called Slêmanî in Kurdish, is a governorate of Iraq in the Kurdish region, with the city of As-Sulaymaniyah as its capital. In the mid-twentieth century it was the Sulaimani liwa, which became a muhafazah around 1970. On 16 March 2014 the Kurdistan Regional Government decreed that Halabja should be split off as a governorate of its own, a change that most sources accept, although Iraqi law has no provision for forming new provinces. The 1997 census counted 1,362,739 people in the governorate before that split, and the census of 25 November 2024 counted 2,287,798 in the governorate as it now stands.