Red, white and green in three equal bands, with a golden sun of twenty-one rays at the centre. Every proportion on this page is drawn from the published construction standard, not approximated.
Drawn to specification: 2:3 ratio, equal bands, 21 rays, one ray pointing straight up.
The flag carries four colours, and each is read as a distinct idea rather than decoration. The readings below are the ones given consistently in Kurdish accounts of the flag.
The blood of those killed in the struggle for Kurdish freedom, and the continuing fight for dignity. It sits at the top of the flag.
Peace and equality. The middle band, and the ground the sun stands on.
The land itself: the mountains, valleys and pastures of Kurdistan, and the life they sustain.
The sun, taken as the source of life and light — the oldest element in the design and the one that carries the most history.
The order matters as much as the colours. Red at the top, above white, above green: sacrifice first, then peace, then the land it was made for. The sun is placed across all three rather than confined to the white band, so the emblem binds the bands together instead of sitting inside one of them.
The red, white and green connect the flag to a wider family of tricolours used across the Kurdish political landscape, but the sun is what makes it unmistakable. No other national flag carries a 21-rayed sun.
Reference works do not agree on a single set of Pantone values, and the two listings above differ noticeably in the red and the green. The hex values are the ones in common use for digital reproduction.
The sun is the oldest part of the design and the part most often drawn wrong. The ray count is not decorative and it is not approximate: it is twenty-one, and the number carries meaning.
Twenty-one is an odd number, which forces an asymmetry into the design: one ray points straight up at the top, while the bottom of the sun is met by two rays either side of the vertical rather than one. That single detail is the quickest way to tell a correctly drawn flag from a careless one.
The number is tied to the native religious traditions of Kurdistan. Twenty-one and its multiples carry weight in Yazidism, Yarsanism and Alevism, and the historian Mehrdad Izady, who led the standardisation of the flag in the late 1990s, described the number as representing the rebirth of an entity or the reincarnation of an idea.
It is also read as a reference to Newroz, the Kurdish new year, which falls on 21 March — the spring equinox, when the sun crosses the celestial equator and day and night stand equal. A sun of twenty-one rays for the day the sun returns.
The rays are straight-sided and sharply pointed, not flame-shaped or wavy, and all twenty-one are identical in size and shape. They radiate from a solid disc at the centre, and they are long enough to cross out of the white band into the red above and the green below.
Every measurement below is expressed as a fraction of the flag’s own height, so the flag can be reproduced at any size — a lapel pin or a stadium banner — without recalculating anything.
Construction diagram. H is the flag height, W the width. The sun is centred on the flag, and because the rays reach a quarter of the height in every direction they extend past the white band into the red and the green.
| Element | Specification |
|---|---|
| Ratio (height : width) | 2 : 3 |
| Bands | Three equal horizontal bands, H/3 each: red, white, green |
| Sun disc diameter | H/4 (a quarter of the flag height) |
| Diameter including rays | H/2 (half the flag height) |
| Number of rays | 21 |
| Ray placement | Evenly spaced every 360° / 21 = 17.14°, one ray pointing straight up |
| Colours | #ED2024 · #FFFFFF · #278E43 · #FEBD11 |
Take the height as two units and the width as three. Each band is two thirds of a unit tall. The sun sits at the exact centre of the flag, its solid disc measuring half a unit across and its rays reaching a full unit from tip to tip. The topmost ray points at the top edge, perpendicular to it.
Because the rays reach half the flag height while the white band is only a third of it, the sun necessarily overlaps into the red and the green. A flag whose sun is contained entirely within the white band is drawn to the wrong proportions — a common error, and an easy one to spot once you know to look.
Measurements follow the construction rule published by Flags of the World, which matches the standard adopted by the Kurdistan National Assembly in 1999. The flag on this page is drawn from that rule in code rather than copied from an image file.
The design is more than a hundred years old. It has flown over a short-lived republic on Mount Ararat, over another in Mahabad, and today over the Kurdistan Region — changing remarkably little along the way.
Sources differ on the year in which Flag Day was formalised; the 17 December date and its link to Mahabad are consistent across accounts.
Red stands for the blood of those killed in the struggle for Kurdish freedom and the continuing fight for dignity. White stands for peace and equality. Green stands for the land of Kurdistan, its mountains and pastures. The golden sun at the centre is taken as the source of life and light.
Twenty-one carries significance in the native religious traditions of Kurdistan, including Yazidism, Yarsanism and Alevism, where the number and its multiples are associated with rebirth and renewal. It is also read as a reference to Newroz, the Kurdish new year, which falls on 21 March. Because 21 is an odd number, one ray always points straight up.
The flag has a height-to-width ratio of 2:3. It is divided into three equal horizontal bands, each one third of the height: red at the top, white in the middle, green at the bottom. The sun is centred on the flag, with a disc one quarter of the flag height across, and rays reaching a total of half the flag height from tip to tip.
For digital reproduction the values in common use are #ED2024 for red, #FFFFFF for white, #278E43 for green and #FEBD11 for yellow. Printed references differ: a 2006 listing gives Pantone 032 red, 354 green and 116 yellow, while the 2023 Album des Pavillons gives 186c red, 7732c green and 116c yellow. There is no single universally published set.
The design was produced in 1920 by the Society for the Rise of Kurdistan, and was later used by Xoybûn at Ararat and by the Republic of Mahabad. It was not the work of one named designer. Its modern technical standard, meaning the fixed proportions, colours and sun geometry, was established in 1998 to 1999 by the historian Mehrdad Izady with Bijhen Eliasi and Dilan Roshani, in coordination with the Flag Institute in the United Kingdom.
17 December. The date marks 17 December 1945, when the flag was raised publicly in Chwar Chra Square in Mahabad, weeks before the Republic of Mahabad was declared. It is observed across the Kurdistan Region with ceremonies in schools and public institutions.