[citation needed] Sanandaj's founding is fairly recent, (about 250 years ago), yet in its short existence it has grown to become one of the centers of Kurdish culture.

[12] However, the local historian Ali-Akbar Munshi Waqayi-Nigar wrote in 1892/3 that Sinna was founded later, by the ruler Soleyman Khan Ardalan, on the site of an earlier settlement; the chronogram he gives for this event corresponds to 1046 AH, or 1636-7 CE.

[12] Its population was mostly Kurdish, with a significant Jewish minority and smaller numbers of Armenian and Assyrian Christians (the latter of which are predominantly Chaldean Catholic).

[7] The city boasted a sizable Assyrian community that spoke a unique dialect of Aramaic called Senaya, they are mostly members of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

[3] The city is between the Qishlaq river, a tributary of the Diyala, and Mount Awidar, which separates it from the old Ardalan capital of Hasanabad.

[24][25] Zhina Modares Gorji, is a local bookseller and podcaster who was sentenced to over twenty years in Sanandaj prison on several charges.