The flag as emoji

Country flag emoji are generated automatically from ISO 3166-1 country codes; no proposal can add one. In March 2022 the Unicode Consortium closed the remaining door: it no longer accepts flag emoji proposals of any category. Only a new country code would still produce a flag automatically.

In March 2022 the Kurdistan Region did receive an ISO 3166-2 subdivision code, at the request of the regional government. A subdivision code cannot generate a normal flag emoji, but it makes a Kurdistan flag technically valid as a so-called tag sequence, the mechanism behind the Scotland and Wales flags. Valid is not visible: only three such flags are supported by platforms, and no vendor renders the Kurdistan sequence yet.

Until that changes, the community writes the flag itself: a red heart, a sun and a green heart.

The full story, with every Unicode rule, all substitute combinations, and copy buttons for each of them, lives on the dedicated emoji reference: kurdistanemoji.com