The growing requirement for present-day English language learners to use English as a lingua franca in the globalized twenty-first century has necessitated the cultivation of not only communicative competence but also intercultural communicative competence (ICC). English language textbooks can fulfill this requirement. However, to see whether an English language coursebook develops its audiences' intercultural communicative competence needs validating or justifying through research. Therefore, the present study investigated the extent to which English language textbooks at lower secondary public schools contain learning tasks aimed at developing intercultural competence (IC), which is a central element of Byram's (1997) ICC model. This was done by comparing two different contexts, Türkiye and Iraq, and using Aijala's (2009) checklist, which is derived from Byram's (1997) model of ICC. The study looked at the dimensions of intercultural competence, the objectives of those dimensions, and the types of cultures addressed. The findings showed that the English language textbooks of the lower secondary public schools in Türkiye and Iraq contain IC learning tasks to a limited extent, with the majority of them addressing the "knowledge of cultures" dimension, some and not all objectives, but all types of cultures.