Tal Afar  Tal Afar (, , , ,) is a city and district in the Nineveh Governorate of northwestern Iraq, 63 km west of Mosul, 52 km east of Sinjar and 200 km north west of Kirkuk. While no official census data exists, the city which had been assessed to have a population of approximately 200,000, had dropped to 80,000, as of 2007, nearly all of whom are Iraqi Turkmen. In Tal Afar itself, the population is mostly Turkmen, about 75 percent of whom were Sunni Muslims, while a quarter were Shi’ites. While most residents can speak Arabic, the Iraqi Turkmen/Turkoman dialect of the Turkish language is the most common language used throughout the city. Tal Afar, along with Altun Kupri, Amirli, Bashir, Bustamli, Mahalabiyah, Qarah Tabbah, Sulaiman Bek, Taza Khurmatu, Tuz Khurmatu and Yankjah, make up the largest Turkmen-majority cities in Iraq, while Mosul, Kirkuk, Kifri, Daquq, Miqdadiyah, Jalawla and Saadiyah have significant Turkmen minority populations. This city was captured by Islamic State in 2014 but was retaken by the Iraqi military in 2017   southwest of the town of Tal Afar are the mounds of Yarim Tepe which yielded remains from the Halafian culture from the Hassuna, Halaf and Ubaid periods, between 7000 and 4500 BC. From perhaps the 25th century BC through to the 7th century AD it was an integral part of Assyria. Tal Afar has been thought to be a city mentioned in the Bible, Telassar or Thela'sar, mentioned in 2 Kings 19:12 and in Isaiah 37:12 as a city inhabited by "the children of Eden" which was at the time ruled by Sennacherib of Assyria. Austen Henry Layard visited Tal Afar and wrote about his experience there in several of his books. In "Nineveh and Its Remains", published in 1867, Layard writes:   "After Hafiz Pasha's expedition in 1837 Tall 'Afar was occupied permanently by Turkish troops and started to be used as a base to control the movements of a number of the Yazidi tribes of eastern Sinjar. In the 1880s Tall 'Afar became an administrative unit depending on the Sinjar "qadha"."