Nashville votes to become sister city with Erbil

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Nashville’s city council on Thursday voted to make Erbil a sister city, recognizing the thousands of Kurds who have made the Tennessee capital their home.

“Last night, Nashville Metro City Council unanimously passed a resolution to make Erbil its 10th sister city,” Bayan Sami Rahman, the Kurdistan Regional government’s (KRG) representative to the United States, said on Twitter. 

Nashville is home to about 20,000 Kurds, the largest Kurdish population in the US, earning the city the moniker “Little Kurdistan.”

“The Kurdish community is a very vibrant community… It is full of very resilient people, people that went through war, and fled, a lot of them are refugees,” council member Zulfat Suara said ahead of the vote, pointing out the similarities between the Kurdish community and the people of Nashville. “They’ve made Nashville home and they have contributed so much to what Nashville is."

"It really makes me happy as an immigrant to see the reception and the acceptance, to see the collaboration, to see this partnership that says that Nashville and Kurdistan-Erbil are partners, and we're sister cities," she added. 

Representatives from both cities have visited each other as part of efforts to make the Kurdistan Region’s capital the first Middle Eastern city to partner with the state capital of Tennessee. In May, a delegation from Nashville headed by Mayor John Cooper paid a visit to Erbil and was received by Governor Omed Khoshnaw, who himself led a delegation to Nashville the year before. 

Erbil will send a delegation to Nashville towards the end of August for an official signing ceremony, according to Nashville councilman Robert Swope, who was a part of the group that visited Erbil.