Iraq vs Iran

Why people mix them up

Four letters, three of them the same, and the two countries share a long border in the Middle East. Both are majority-Shia Muslim, both appear constantly in the same news stories, and the 1980s war between them welded the names together in many people's memory. Yet they belong to different worlds: Iraq is an Arab country built around the Tigris and Euphrates, while Iran is Persian, far larger and stretches from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf.

How to tell them apart

• Iran is east of Iraq and almost four times the size, about 1.65 million km² against 438,000 km².
• Iran's official language is Persian (Farsi); Iraq's are Arabic and Kurdish.
• Iran has two coasts: the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman in the south. Iraq has only a tiny outlet to the Gulf near Basra.
• Iraq's flag is red-white-black with green Arabic script; Iran's flag is green-white-red with a red emblem in the centre.
• The capitals are Baghdad (Iraq) and Tehran (Iran). Baghdad sits on the Tigris; Tehran lies at the foot of the Alborz mountains.
• Iran borders Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan; Iraq borders Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Memory hook

Alphabetically Iran comes before Iraq, but on the map it is the opposite: Iraq is on the left, Iran is on the right. Think "Iran is on the right-hand side, Iraq is next to Arabia".

On the map

For Iraq, start from the top of the Persian Gulf at Kuwait and tap the country directly north of it, between Syria and Iran. For Iran, tap the large country that fills the whole eastern shore of the Persian Gulf and reaches up to the Caspian Sea, between Iraq and Afghanistan. If the country you are tapping touches Pakistan, it is Iran.