In 2006, the Board of Trustees of the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani set out to establish a not-for-profit institution dedicated to providing a comprehensive liberal arts education for the benefit of Kurdistan, Iraq and the wider region.

This new university would be designed to develop strength in critical thinking, the ability to communicate well, a strong work ethic, good citizenship and personal integrity. They sought to create an institution not only innovative in its teaching methodology, but also unique in its role as an establishment of learning unaffected by sectarian divides and affiliations, where talented students from across the country and region would come to learn, regardless of their ethnic, sociopolitical or economic background.