Chaldean Catholic Archeparchy of Kirkuk-Sulaimaniya
The foundation of the Chaldean Catholic diocese of Kirkuk has been attributed to Yohannan VIII Hormizd, who was recognised by the Vatican as patriarchal administrator of the patriarch of Babylon in 1780 and, after five decades of disputes and confrontations, as patriarch in 1830. According to the Chaldean Catholic priest Joseph Tfinkdji, Yohannan Hormizd visited the town of Kirkuk in 1789 while travelling from Mosul to Baghdad, and converted its Church of the East community to Catholicism. He is said to have consecrated a Chaldean metropolitan for Kirkuk, Mar Abraham, who resided in Aïnqawa during his reign, and died between 1821 and 1824. The source for this assertion is not clear. Abraham is not mentioned by any other source, and as Yohannan Hormizd himself (then considered by the Vatican to be merely metropolitan of Mosul) is styled 'metropolitan of Kirkuk' in a colophon of 1798, the Kirkuk region would seem to have been part of the diocese of Mosul at this period.
Hormizd II
After his death, he was succeeded by his eldest son Adur Narseh, who, after a brief reign which lasted few months, was killed by some of the nobles of the empire. They then blinded the second, and imprisoned the third (Hormizd, who afterwards escaped to the Roman Empire). The throne was reserved for the unborn child of Hormizd II's wife Ifra Hormizd, which was Shapur II. It is said that Shapur II may have been the only king in history to be crowned "in utero", as the legend claims that the crown was placed upon his mother's womb while she was pregnant. However, according to Shahbazi, it is unlikely that Shapur was crowned as king while still in his mother's womb, since the nobles could not have known of his sex at that time. He further states that Shapur was born forty days after his father's death, and that the nobles killed Adur Narseh and crowned Shapur II in order to gain greater control of the empire, which they were able to do until Shapur II reached his majority at the age of 16.