Actually I can&#x27;t think of many cases where German would use pronouns with countries. The reason these are masculine is because they are typically referred to using a definitive pronoun (literally &quot;the Iraq&quot;, &quot;the Iran&quot;, etc). It&#x27;s more common with names of regions -- which may indicate that these countries used to be mere geographical regions (rather than sovereign nations) when the names entered the German language.<p>It also happens with countries like the UK, the US, the Czech Republic and so on, but obviously for the same reasons as in English.<p>I can&#x27;t actually think of a country that&#x27;s feminine in German. The &quot;die&quot; you often see is actually indicating plural (e.g. &quot;die vereinigten Staaten&quot;, the United States; or &quot;die Niederlande&quot;, &quot;the Netherlands&quot;).