Iraq uses AST (Arabia Standard Time), UTC+3, year-round. No daylight saving time has been observed since 2008, when it was abolished during the politically turbulent period following the 2003 US-led invasion.

Mesopotamia: where timekeeping began

The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which constitutes modern Iraq, was the cradle of some of the world’s earliest civilizations, and those civilizations invented foundational elements of the timekeeping systems we use today.

The Sumerians divided the day into 12 double-hours and the night into 12 double-hours, totaling 24 units. They also divided the circle into 360 degrees (a system possibly derived from their base-60 (sexagesimal) numerical system, or from the approximate 360 days of the year). The Babylonians inherited and refined these systems, creating the 60-minute hour and the 60-second minute that we still use globally.

The degree-minute-second system for measuring angles and therefore longitude (which underlies the entire global timezone framework) derives from this ancient Mesopotamian mathematics. The 24-hour day derives from the same source. Modern UTC, for all its atomic precision, is built on top of a numerical system invented in ancient Iraq.

Baghdad’s historical centrality

At its height in the 8th to 10th centuries CE, Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate was the largest city in the world outside of China, with a population perhaps exceeding a million. The city was a center of Islamic learning, translation, and scientific advancement, including in astronomy and mathematics. Arab astronomers of this period made crucial contributions to measuring the motions of the heavens, which is to say, measuring time.

Al-Biruni, Al-Khwarizmi, and other scholars working in the Abbasid intellectual tradition developed astronomical tables, algorithms for calendar calculation, and methods for determining longitude that laid groundwork for centuries of subsequent science.

UTC+3 and the post-2003 chaos

Iraq’s timezone management during the post-invasion period was complicated by the breakdown of central government authority. DST had been observed on and off, and in 2008 the government quietly stopped observing it. With electricity supply irregular in many areas and digital infrastructure damaged, the precise UTC offset was less practically significant than simply having power to run a clock at all.

Iraq’s neighbors Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are also at UTC+3 without DST. Jordan is at UTC+3 in summer. Turkey is at UTC+3 year-round. The UTC+3 region is a consistent block in the Middle East.

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