Background: 1061 individuals were sampled from the cities of Anbar, Baghdad, Basra, Diyala, Najaf, and Wasit in Iraq and typed for 15 forensic STRs to explore the genetic structure of Iraq and develop a forensic DNA database .The total number of alleles that were identified were 203 alleles .Analyses found that Iraq is similar to other countries in the Middle East, particularly Iran and Turkey, and is more similar to Europe than either Asia or Africa. Results: These loci had an average heterozygosity of 0.779, homozygosity of 0.221, polymorphism information content of 0.77, power of discrimination of 0.927, and power of exclusion of 0.563. At these loci, a matching genotype will occur, on average, in 1 in 8.152 x 10 17 individuals. For paternity tests, the average paternity probability for a matching profile is 99.9997%. For both measures, this can be taken as an exact match. These loci are appropriate for use in forensic and paternity testing for this population. Conclusions: The results of this study indicate that these 15 autosomal STR loci are useful markers for forensics and paternity testing for the population in Iraq. Some loci present with a large range of repeats which may be the result of admixture within the population. Further analyses on the allele frequencies of specific ethnic groups within Iraq may clarify the origins of the rarer alleles that were found in this study.