Tal Afar is a city and district in northwestern Iraq in the Ninawa Governorate located approximately 30 miles west of Mosul and 120 miles north west of Kirkuk.
While no official census data exists, the city which had been assessed to have a population of approximately 200,000, had dropped to 80,000 as of 2007, nearly all of whom are Iraqi Turkmen. In Tal�Afar itself, the population is mostly Turkomen, about 75 percent of whom were Sunni Muslims, while a quarter were Shi�ites. While most residents speak Arabic, a dialect of Turkomen is regularly used throughout the city
