page_title: Al Anbar Governorate
section_title: Population
hierarchical_section_title: Al Anbar Governorate / Population
caption_attribution_description: English: A cropped version of a CIA map of Iraq.
context_page_description: Al Anbar Governorate, or Anbar Province, is the largest governorate in Iraq by area. Encompassing much of the country's western territory, it shares borders with Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. The provincial capital is Ramadi; other important cities include Fallujah and Haditha.
  The governorate was known as Ramadi up to 1976, when it was renamed Al Anbar Province, and it was known as Dulaim before 1962. A large majority of the inhabitants of the province are Sunni Muslims and most belong to the Dulaim tribe, all of which speak Arabic.
  In early 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, with the assistance of local Sunni militia, launched a successful campaign to seize control of the province from the Iraqi government. Numerous offensive actions were undertaken by the Iraqi government to remove ISIL's occupation of the province – the Anbar campaign, the Western Anbar offensive and the 2017 Western Iraq campaign. The area was effectively recaptured by the end of 2017.
context_section_description: In the 1920s, the governorate had a population of 250,000, as did Baghdad, out of a total population of 2 million in Iraq. Today there are 9 million people living in Baghdad, among them a million Anbari people in the city and suburbs; their origins are the people of the Al-Anbar tribes that have moved to Baghdad during the past 500 years and their recent migrations there during the 1920s and 1930s.
  Half of the residents in Anbar are living on the banks of the Euphrates River outside cities and the towns, there were between 1.9 million and 2 million inhabitants in the districts of Al Anbar. The largest cities are Ramadi (pop. 900,000) and Fallujah (700,000).
  According to UN estimate in 2003 the population of Al Anbar is 1,230,169. There are no precise estimates of the population which include all of the cities and towns and villages in Anbar. According to a 2003 estimate by the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq, the population was 1,230,140.
  It is estimated that around 90 percent of Anbar's inhabitants are adherents of the Sunni branch of Islam. The remaining ten percent are either Christians or other minorities.
caption: The main cities of Al Anbar
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