Abstract In the previous three decades, environmental and climatic systems have experienced considerable changes. These changes have probably influenced dust events in different areas in the world. Iraq represents one of the exposed regions to dust events. The study aims to (i) describe the spatialtemporal patterns of aerosol index values and dust events variability over Iraq using remote sensing data (AI-TOMS and OMI data with climate factors) and dust observations (suspended dust, rising dust and dust storms), (ii) identify the potential sources and transport pathways of dust storms over Iraq using ground and satellite data, (iii) identify signatures of the physical, mineralogical and chemical characteristics of chosen dust storms using grain size, XRD and XRF analyses and identify their possible sources using backward trajectories from the HYSPLIT model.