Shafaq News
Kirkuk's railway station has not seen a train in morethan a decade. The platforms are empty, the schedules obsolete, and thewhistles that once marked the city's rhythm have been absent since 2014. Whatremains is a building that locals describe as thicker with memory thanmovement, and a provincial council that wants to change that.
For Ali Al-Hamzali, a Kirkuk resident whose family haslived beside the station for generations, the building holds a record of thecity's twentieth century that no archive quite captures.
Speaking to Shafaq News, Al-Hamzali said the originalstation once stood in the Al-Hamzali district near the air base before beingrelocated to its current site, and recalls that among the events fixing it inlocal memory was the passage of the late Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)founder Mullah Mustafa Barzani through Kirkuk in 1970, in the period thatfollowed the March 11 autonomy agreement between the Kurdish movement and theIraqi government.
: Mullah Mustafa Barzani and other Barzanis released from Ottoman prison
The station went beyond a transit point to a meetingground for families, travelers, and merchants, a daily public space whoserhythm shaped the markets around it. Older residents still remember the longjourneys to Baghdad and Mosul, and the way the station’s traffic fed thesurrounding economy, particularly as the oil sector expanded and the railwaycarried workers, equipment, and freight through the province.
A Line’s Revival
The latest attempt to bring the station back intonational life was announced from inside the building itself. At the opening ofKirkuk's second Investment and Real Estate Exhibition, held on the stationgrounds, provincial council head Mohammed Ibrahim Al-Hafez revealed a proposalto link Kirkuk's railway with neighboring countries, describing it as astrategic step to reposition the city as a logistics hub connecting Iraq to itsregional surroundings.
No timeline, financing plan, or named bilateralagreements have been announced in connection with the proposal.
The picture on the ground is more specific, if stillconditional. Iraqi Republic Railways completed its assessment of theKirkuk–Baiji line in late April 2026, including structural evaluations of theAl-Fatha bridge, the main link between the two lines, and the Canal bridge. Thedeputy director general of Iraqi Republic Railways, engineer Ali Oudeh, saidduring a visit to the station on April 30 that rehabilitation of the Al-Fathabridge is estimated at around 60 billion dinars, while the Canal bridge wouldrequire approximately 1.5 billion dinars.
The station itself, he said, is technically ready toreceive trains. What it is waiting for is the bridges and the money to fixthem. That money depends on a federal budget that Iraq has not passed in 16consecutive months. Oudeh said that if budget allocations are secured, the linecould be restored to service within a year and a half.
The Line That Reached Aleppo
Kirkuk's railway story begins in the first decades ofthe twentieth century, as the Iraqi state worked to tie its main cities into amodern transport network. The city's geographic position and economic weight,particularly in oil, gave the station exceptional importance from the start.
Service to Kirkuk commenced in August 1925, extendingthe wartime line pushed northeast from Baghdad through Diyala. By 1930,foundations were being laid for a more ambitious Kirkuk–Baghdad–Haifa route,though the Haifa section was abandoned when the 1948 Arab–Israeli war renderedthat terminus inaccessible. A 105-kilometer extension toward Erbil followed,with the first train arriving there in 1950.
Regional historian Ahmed Al-Bayati told Shafaq Newsthat the line connected Kirkuk southward to Saladin, Diyala, and Baghdad, andnorthward through Nineveh as far as the Syrian city of Aleppo. With thecompletion of the Mosul–Tel Kotchek section of the Berlin–Baghdad railway inJuly 1940, the Taurus Express ran its first uninterrupted Istanbul–Baghdadservice, drawing Kirkuk into a corridor that linked the Bosphorus to the Gulf.
The station's slow eclipse began in the 1980s, whenBaghdad used railway policy as an instrument of political geography. A newstandard-gauge line running from Haditha through Baiji to Kirkuk, opened in1988 at a cost of around 960 million dollars, tied the city more closely toSunni Arab areas in western Iraq while deliberately severing rail access to theKurdish region that had been granted nominal autonomy in 1970, a physicalexpression of Saddam Hussein's Arabization policy. The meter-gauge line to Erbilwas wound down between 1984 and 1988.
: Iraq’s railway network: Glorious past vs. troubled present
The line absorbed successive shocks over the followingdecades. A US Air Force strike during the 1991 Gulf War damaged keyinfrastructure along the Transversal Line between Baiji and Kirkuk. The 2003invasion brought further disruption to a network already stretched by years ofsanctions and neglect. Then ISIS swept through northern Iraq in 2014, and whatremained of rail movement through Kirkuk stopped entirely —the western branchtoward Haditha closed after militant vandalism, and the whistles familiar tothe city's residents fell silent.
They have not returned since.
Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.