How popular is the baby name Nayirah in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Nayirah.

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Popularity of the baby name Nayirah


Posts that mention the name Nayirah

Where did the baby name Nasiriyah come from in 2003?

Aftermath of the Battle of Nasiriyah, 2003

The name Nasiriyah was a one-hit wonder in the U.S. baby name data in 2003:

  • 2005: unlisted
  • 2004: unlisted
  • 2003: 15 baby girls named Nasiriyah [debut]
  • 2002: unlisted
  • 2001: unlisted

Where did “Nasiriyah” come from, and what happened in 2003 to draw people’s attention to it?

It came from the city of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. The city was founded and named after a local sheikh name Nasir in the 1870s. (The Arabic name Nasir means “helper.”)

The event that introduced Nasiriyah to the American public was the Iraq War (which overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein and, thereby, had an influence on Iraqi baby names). The Battle of Nasiriyah, one of the first major battles of the war, was fought between U.S. Marines and Iraqi forces and lasted from March 23 to April 2.

(One of the female soldiers involved in the battle, Jessica Lynch, had a baby girl in 2007 and gave her the middle name Ann in honor of Lori Ann Piestewa, the first woman in the U.S. military killed in the Iraq War.)

What do you think of Nasiriyah as a baby name? Do you like it more or less than the similar names Nayirah and Nasiya?

Sources: Nasiriyah – Wikipedia, U.S. Marines in Battle: An-Nasiriyah (PDF)

Where did the baby name Nayirah come from in 1992?

"Nayirah" giving her testimony in 1990
“Nayirah” giving her testimony

In October of 1990, two months after Saddam Hussein‘s Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl using the pseudonym “Nayirah” testified in front of the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

Nayirah claimed to be a Kuwaiti refugee who’d been volunteering in a Kuwaiti hospital at the start of the Iraqi occupation. She said she’d seen Iraqi soldiers remove Kuwaiti babies from incubators, take the incubators, and then leave the babies “on the cold floor to die.”

Her emotional testimony helped sway public opinion in favor of the Gulf War.

But in early 1992, her testimony was called into question. New York Times writer John MacArthur revealed that Nayirah was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States. Her appearance had been arranged by a U.S. public relations firm and sponsored by a Kuwaiti organization pushing for military intervention. Most importantly, the claims she made could not be corroborated:

Saddam Hussein committed plenty of atrocities, but not, apparently, this one. The teenager’s accusation, at first verified by Amnesty International, was later refuted by that group as well as by other independent human rights monitors.

And amid this controversy in 1992, the baby name Nayirah appeared for the very first time in the U.S. baby name data:

  • 1994: unlisted
  • 1993: unlisted
  • 1992: 13 baby girls named Nayirah [debut]
  • 1991: unlisted
  • 1990: unlisted

The name, which means “luminous” in Arabic, dropped out of the data the next year. It remained a one-hit wonder until reappearing just recently, in 2015.

Sources: