Single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems with space frequency block coding (SFBC) transmissions achieve both spatial and frequency diversity gains in wireless communications. However, SFBC SC-FDMA schemes using linear detectors suffer from severe performance deterioration because of noise enhancement propagation and additive noise presence in the detected output. Both issues are similar to inter-symbol-interference (ISI). Traditionally, SC-FDMA system decision feedback equalizer (DFE) is often used to eliminate ISI caused by multipath propagation. This article proposes frequency domain turbo equalization based on nonlinear multiuser detection for uplink SFBC SC-FDMA transmission systems. The presented iterative receiver performs equalization with soft decisions feedback for ISI mitigation. Its coefficients are derived using minimum mean squared error criteria. The receiver configuration study is Alamouti's SFBC with two transmit and two receive antennas. New receiver approach is compared with the recently proposed suboptimal linear detector for SFBC SC-FDMA systems. Simulation results confirm that the performance of the proposed iterative detection outperforms conventional detection techniques. After a few iterations, bit-error-rate performance of the proposed receiver design is closely to the matched filter bound. General structure for multiuser SC-FDMA MIMO transmitter and receiver system model. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.