Street Lighting Poles for Iraq: What the Specification Actually Requires

The document that governs a street lighting pole in Iraq is not EN 40. The Ministry of Electricity’s own Technical Specification of Street Lighting Poles, specification number D-13, issued by the Planning and Studies Office in Baghdad, builds its requirements on IEC for the electrical side, EN 10025 for the steel grade, and ASTM A 123 or BS 729 for the galvanizing. The EN 40 series is not referenced in it at all. A European supplier who quotes EN 40 compliance and stops there has not answered the Iraqi specification.

Artay Lighting has cast aluminium in its own die-cast foundry in Istanbul since 1999 and exports to more than 33 countries. This page sets out what the Iraqi specification asks for, what the climate does to a pole that was designed for a European one, and what actually has to happen at the border.

Which standards govern a street lighting pole in Iraq?

Specification D-13 is the reference point for Ministry of Electricity street lighting work. Its revision year is 2009 with a 2013 update, and it was published in full as an annex to a UNDP procurement notice, which is where a foreign bidder can read it. The standards it names are worth listing precisely, because they are not the ones a European tender would name:

That last clause matters more than the table. It means an EN 40 pole is not excluded; it means EN 40 has to be offered as an equivalence and approved, rather than assumed. We could not confirm from a public source whether D-13 has been revised again since 2013, so the practical step before quoting is to ask the contracting authority which revision applies to that tender. Anyone who tells you the revision without checking is guessing.

What does the Iraqi specification actually require?

These are the numbers from D-13. They are unusual enough that a pole designed for a European road will not meet several of them without being redesigned.

Two of these deserve a second look. 140 km/h is about 39 m/s, which is a high design wind by European road-lighting standards and drives wall thickness and base diameter rather than being absorbed by a safety factor. And the galvanizing requirement is stated twice, as a thickness and as a mass per unit area, which is worth doing the arithmetic on. Zinc has a density of about 7.14 g/cm³, so 500 g/m² is roughly 70 µm, while 85 µm is roughly 600 g/m². The thickness figure is the stricter of the two, and a galvanizing certificate that reports only mass per unit area does not on its own show that the 85 µm requirement has been met.

We supply the 7, 10 and 12 m sizes in that table. We do not make high-mast poles, and the two-piece 15 m type is outside what we manufacture. Saying so at quotation stage costs a line item and saves a claim later.

Why does 55 °C change the pole rather than only the luminaire?

Because heat and dust reach the pole through the parts that are not steel. The gasket at the access door, the sealing at the cable entry, the label adhesive, the terminal block insulation and the coating itself all have a service temperature, and a component rated for a European summer sits at the top of its range for months in Basra rather than for a week.

The published climate figures behind the specification are stark. In southern Iraq, June to August, average temperatures pass 40 °C in the day and fall only to around 30 °C at night, while northern Iraq sits nearer 25 °C in July and August; in recent years the temperature in Baghdad and Basra has repeatedly exceeded 50 °C. Average annual precipitation across the country is 179 mm, and under 100 mm in the south and west. Those figures are from the Climate Risk Profile for Iraq published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and adelphi in 2022.

Dust is the second half of the problem, and it is measured. The same profile records that Iraq’s Ministry of Environment counted 122 dust storms and 283 dusty days in 2014, and projected that the country could see 300 dust storms a year within a decade. Airborne sand does two things to a pole: it abrades the coating on the windward face, and it enters every aperture that is not sealed. A door gasket specified for rain is not a door gasket specified for dust, and the earthing point inside the door is what corrodes first once dust and the occasional humid night get in together.

What about corrosion in Basra and the south?

Near the Gulf the question changes from heat to chloride. ISO 12944-2 classifies atmospheric corrosivity in categories, and its own descriptions are the honest way to use them: C3 covers urban and industrial atmospheres with moderate sulfur dioxide levels and coastal areas with low salinity; C4 covers industrial areas and coastal areas with moderate salinity; C5 covers industrial areas with high humidity and aggressive atmosphere and coastal areas with high salinity; CX covers offshore areas with high salinity, industrial areas with extreme humidity, and subtropical and tropical atmospheres.

No standard assigns a category to a named city, and anyone who tells you Basra “is C5” is offering judgment rather than a citation. What a specification can do is state the category it requires and let the coating system follow from it. The mechanism, and what it means for fixings, base details and cable entry, is set out in the coastal lighting poles guide – the chemistry near the Gulf is the same chemistry as the Mediterranean, in a hotter and dustier form.

What has to happen at the border?

There is no free trade agreement between Türkiye and Iraq. Iraq does not appear on the Turkish Ministry of Trade’s list of free trade agreements; the relationship runs through a Joint Economic Commission and, since an April 2024 memorandum, a Joint Economic and Trade Commission. Duty is therefore ordinary Iraqi customs duty under Customs Tariff Law No. 22 of 2010, not a preferential rate, and there is no A.TR or EUR.1 shortcut.

Iraq’s tariff schedule is also in motion. Cabinet Decision No. 957, reported as approved in late October 2025, revises rates across roughly 16,400 tariff items into brackets running from 0.5% to 30%, with enforcement reported to begin in early 2026, and it is the subject of a constitutional challenge on the ground that duties may only be imposed by law. We are not going to publish a rate for a lighting column against that background. Ask your customs broker for the rate on the day, and get it in writing.

Separately, imports into Iraq fall under ICIGI, the pre-import inspection, testing and certification programme mandated by the Central Organization for Standardization and Quality Control. Where a product is on the regulated list, a Certificate of Conformity is required for customs clearance and is valid for six months, and an updated product standards list took effect on 17 June 2025. Whether street lighting columns sit on that regulated list is not something we could establish from a public source – so confirm it with a CoC issuing body before the container moves, rather than after.

One thing we can rule out. The Iraqi Quality Mark introduced under COSQC Announcement No. 15 of 2024, with a compliance deadline of 1 July 2024, applies to named categories – electric water heaters, heaters, ovens, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners and tobacco products. Lighting poles are not among them.

How are Iraqi lighting tenders published?

There is no single national e-procurement portal of the kind Greece, Croatia or Georgia operate. The General Government Contracts Department of the Ministry of Planning develops the standard contract documents, audits contracting procedures and maintains contractor blacklists, under Government Contracts Implementation Instructions No. 2 of 2014. Tenders themselves surface through individual ministry websites, the Official Gazette, UNDP Iraq procurement notices and World Bank project notices.

Documents are in Arabic, and financial statements submitted in another language have to be translated and notarised. In practice a foreign manufacturer bids either through an Iraqi branch or with a local agent or partner, because execution normally requires a presence in country. That is a commercial arrangement rather than a technical one, but it shapes the timeline more than anything in the specification does.

What can Artay supply for an Iraqi project?

Hot-dip galvanized steel poles to EN ISO 1461, up to 12 m, fabricated to the EN 40 series and offered against D-13 as an equivalence; cast aluminium poles, bollards and luminaire housings from our own foundry in Başakşehir, Istanbul, in EN AC-46000 (AlSi9Cu3) alloy with chromate pre-treatment before electrostatic powder coating; and combinations of the two. Luminaires are CE marked, and manufacturing is certified to TSE under TS EN 40 for lighting columns and to ISO 9001 for quality management. Ask for the certificate together with its scope – a certificate covering luminaires does not cover columns, and the two are routinely confused in tender documents.

We do not make high-mast poles, and we buy in extruded aluminium profile rather than extruding it ourselves, as most of this market does. What we do make from nothing is a form: because the aluminium is cast rather than fabricated, a governorate can have a pole of its own, carrying its own emblem in the base. A new die is cut in our own tool shop in four to six weeks and a first delivery follows seven to nine weeks after drawing approval; repeat orders on that die ship in three weeks. Changing only height, diameter, wall thickness, arm length or RAL colour needs no die at all and carries no minimum order.

Send the tender specification, a drawing or a written requirement to info@artaylighting.com and we will return a technical drawing with a wind-load calculation at the design velocity the tender states, a galvanizing declaration, and a delivery date.

Related guides

• Street lighting pole types – the four families, and how a galvanized steel pole is actually made, step by step.
• Coastal lighting poles – chloride, corrosivity categories, fixings and cable entry.
• What drives the cost of a lighting pole – where the money goes, and why unit prices are not published.
• OEM and private label manufacturing – tooling cost, minimum order and lead times in writing.
• Lighting pole materials – galvanized steel, cast aluminium and extruded profile compared.
• Lighting poles for Kuwait – why MEW/S-1 excludes street lighting columns, and what applies instead.
• Lighting poles for Georgia – zero duty since 2008, diagonal cumulation with the EU, and what 2,435 mm of rain a year does to a pole.
• Lighting poles for Greece – the ELOT technical specification a tender actually cites, CE marking and the A.TR certificate.
• The EN 40 series explained – which part does what, which one carries CE marking, and what EN 40 leaves to other standards.