The Kurdish Case for Kirkuk *
By Dr. Nouri Talabany
While Kirkuk’s demography has been in flux in recent decades, largely a result of ethnic cleansing campaigns implemented by Ba'athist
regime of Sadam Hussein, but when free from that regime, many Kurdish refugees have returned to their homes in the city and its
immediate environs. Many diplomats and analysts may be tempt ding to delay decisions about the final status of Kirkuk, whether it should
remain as it is, or joins Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, any delay could be counterproductive to the goals of peace and stability.
A Mixed City
Historically, the majority of the city’s population was Kurdish and Turcoman. The Turcomans traced their families back to the Ottoman era.
Later, Arabs began to settle in the region. Writing of the ethnic composition of the city, the Ottoman encyclopaedist Shamsaddin Sami,
author of the Qamus al-A’lam, published in Istanbul in 1897 found that, “Three quarters of the inhabitants of Kirkuk are Kurds and the rest
are Turcomans, Arabs, and others. Seven hundred and sixty Jews and 460 Chaldeans also reside in the city.”
The Kurds predate other resident groups; the northern and eastern districts of the cities have been traditionally Kurdish. Turcomans later
migrated to the region. According to the Encylopedia of Islam, the local Kurdish population in Kirkuk was joined by a Turcoman minority as
far as the ninth century C.E., when caliphs installed Turcoman garrisons in the region. In his history of the various Iraqi provinces, Iraqi
historian Abdul Majid Fahmi Hassan placed the Turcoman migration in the mid-seventeenth century when Ottoman Sultan Murad IV wrested
the region from Iranian control. As Murad returned to Istanbul, he left army units in position to control the strategic route linking Baghdad
and Anatolia; the Iraqi Turcomans descended from these troops. Prominent Turcoman families in Kirkuk, such as the Neftçiler and Awçi,
trace their ancestry to Murad’s troops; moreover, the prominent ethnic Arab Tikriti family also traces their presence in the region to
Murad’s soldiers, and the Sultan’s gift of land in and around Kirkuk as a reward for their military service against the Iranians.
In the late Ottoman period, Kirkuk was the administrative center of the wilayet (province) of Sharazur. In 1879, it became a sanjak (district)
within the vilayet of Mosul. Further changes occurred in the region in 1918 when the British army occupied the Mosul wilayet and created a
new Arbil governorate. In 1921, the British estimated the population of the Kirkuk region to be 75,000 Kurds; 35,000 Turcomans; 10,000
Arabs; 1,400 Jews; and 600 Chaldeans. A League of Nations Committee that visited the Mosul wilayet in 1925 estimated that the Kurds
comprised 63 percent of Kirkuk’s population, the Turcomans, 19 percent, and the Arabs, 18 percent.
Many Kurds grew crops and raised livestock near the streams and wells in the northern and eastern parts of the Kirkuk region while, in the
city of Kirkuk, Arab, Assyrian, and Armenian migration to the city accelerated after the 1927 discovery of oil. From 1935, Arab families
migrated to the nearby Hawija plain, southwest of Kirkuk, after the Iraqi government launched a large-scale irrigation project to open the
drier southwestern portion of the region to agriculture. Other Arabs settled in Kirkuk as civil servants or serving as officers and soldiers in
the Second Division of the Iraqi army, most of which was stationed in Kirkuk.
Because there was no census taken in Iraq until 1947, however, such figures are estimates, and the 1947 census itself is of little help
because its gives no precise details of the ethnic composition of the population. However, the 1957 –widely acknowledged as the most
valid because it was the least politicized—broke down population by mother tongue, finding Kirkuk was 48.3 percent Kurd, 28.2 percent
Arab, 21.4 percent Turcoman, and the rest Chaldean, Assyrian, or other.
While demography might shift with time, Kirkuk’s various communities have a long history of coexistence. Politically, Kurds have a long
tradition of leadership in Kirkuk. On a national level, most Kirkuk representatives in the Iraqi parliament were Kurds and a smaller number of
Turcomans. Local Arab representatives entered the parliament after settlement of the Hawija region. In the late Ottoman era, the sultan’s
governors mostly nominated Turcomans as mayor although, on certain occasions, Kurds also held the position. Later, during the
monarchy, Kirkuk’s mayors were mostly Kurds from the Talabany family. It was only during the late Ottoman era and the Iraqi monarchy,
that many Turcomans became mayors. The first Arab mayor took office in 1969, when the Baathist regime appointed Muzhir al-
Tikriti.
Until 1955, the Kirkuk had just one high school and the majority of the students had Kurdish and Turcoman backgrounds, with smaller
numbers of Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Armenians. Most Arab students were the children of civil servants, military personnel, or
employees of the Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC).
By long-standing tradition, the Kurds, Turcomans, Chaldeans, and Jews have had their own cemeteries. The Arabs, being a minority, buried
their dead in the Turcoman cemeteries. However, in 1991, Saddam Hussein’s government created special cemeteries for Arab settlers and
banned Arab Shi‘ites from taking their dead back to Najaf for burial in order to bolster the Arab claim to the city. The Baathist regime
subsequently began to rewrite Kurdish tombstone inscriptions with Arabic in order to retroactively alter the demography.
Ethnic Cleansing
The Ba'athists sough to implement their Arab nationalism by force. In June 1963, the short-lived Ba'athist regime of Ali Saleh al-Sa’adi
destroyed thirteen Kurdish villages around Kirkuk and expelled the population of another thirty-four Kurdish villages in the Dubz district
near Kirkuk, replacing them with Arabs from central and southern Iraq.
After the Baath party consolidated power in 1963, the National Guard (al-Haras al-Qawmi), recruited Arab Ba'athists and Turcomans who
systematically attacked ethnic Kurds. Between 1963 and 1988, the Ba'athist regime destroyed 779 Kurdish villages in the Kirkuk region—
razing 493 primary schools, 598 mosques, and 40 medical clinics. In order to prevent the return of the Kurds, they burned farms and
orchards, confiscated cattle, blew up wells, and obliterated cemeteries. In all, this ethnic cleansing campaign forced 37,726 Kurdish families
out of their villages. Given the average rural Kurdish family size of between five and seven people, this policy forced over 200,000 Kurds to
flee the region. The Kurds were not the regime’s only victims. During the Iran-Iraq war, the central government destroyed about ten Shi‘ite
Turcoman villages south of Kirkuk.
The Iraqi government also compelled urban Kurds to leave Kirkuk. It transferred oil company employees, civil servants, and teachers to
southern and central Iraq. The Ba'athist government renamed streets and schools in Arabic and forced businesses to adopt Arab names.
Kurds could only sell real estate to Arabs; non-Arabs could not purchase property in the city. The government allocated thousands of new
residential units for Arabs only. Ethnic cleansing intensified after the 1991 Kuwait war when the Republican Guards crushed a short-lived
uprising. In 1996, the regime passed an “identity law” to force Kurds and other non-Arabs to register as Arab. The government expelled
from the region anyone who refused. In 1997, the Iraqi government demolished Kirkuk’s historic citadel, with its mosques and ancient
church. Human Rights Watch estimated that between 1991 and 2003, the Iraqi government expelled between 120,000 and 200,000 non-
Arabs from Kirkuk and its environs.
In September 1999, the U.S. State Department reported that the Iraqi government had displaced approximately 900,000 citizens throughout
Iraq. The report continued to describe how “Local officials in the south have ordered the arrest of any official or citizen who provides
employment, food or shelter to newly arriving Kurds.”
A New Beginning for Kirkuk?
In April 2003, coalition forces and the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga liberated Kirkuk from Baathist control. Many victims of Saddam’s ethnic
cleansing campaign sought to return to the region, only to be prevented by U.S. authorities. Many remain in tent-city limbo. Article 58 of
the March 8, 2004 Transitional Administrative Law sought to settle disputes in Kirkuk by means of an Iraqi Property Claims Commission
and “other relevant bodies.” In practice, however, successive Iraqi governments have done little, creating suspicion among many Iraqi
Kurds as to the central government’s intentions. The uncertainty over Kirkuk’s status has impeded local development and sidelined the
issue of refugee resettlement.
Article 140 of the new Iraqi constitution has adopted Article 58 of the Transitional Administrative Law, which necessitates the normalization
of the situation in Kirkuk, by which the legislature meant the assistance of the return of internally displaced people and their reclamation of
seized property. Arabs installed in the region should be helped to return to southern and central Iraq, should they so desire. The four
sub-districts of Kifri, Chemchemal, Kalar, and Tuz-Khurmatu annexed to neighboring governorates by the regime in 1976 should be
returned to the governorate of Kirkuk. Article 140 also states that a local census must be organized and a referendum held to decide the
future of the province. The set deadline for the implementation of this article is December 2007. However, if Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-
Maliki does not implement the article within the allocated time, ethnic and sectarian unrest could explode in Kirkuk, the effects rippling out
throughout Iraq.
A report by the International Crisis Group proposes that the Iraqi government invite the U.N. Security Council “to appoint an envoy to start
negotiations to designate the Kirkuk governorate as a stand-alone, federal region for an interim period,” and recommended postponing the
constitutionally-mandated referendum because of the threat that it could further exacerbate an already uncertain security situation.
There is no need for another envoy. With many Arab League nations and Turkey opposed to the expansion of Kurdish self-rule, an U.N.
envoy would not have the confidence of most of Kirkuk’s residents. Nor should outside organizations, however well-meaning, delay
implementation of Article 140. A wide swath of Iraqi society accepted the constitution after extensive consultation. And, on August 9, the
Iraqi government nominated a high committee chaired by the Minister of Justice to implement Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution without
delay.
Until the December 2007 referendum, which the U.N. has expertise to organize, it will be impossible to know whether local residents wish
Kirkuk to be absorbed into the Kurdistan Regional Government. Many Kurds do, but others are afraid of being pushed aside by established
patronage networks and political machines imposed from outside the city.
Rather than destabilize the region, formal resolution of the dispute over Kirkuk’s status should calm the city. Various ethnic and sectarian
communities co-existed peacefully in Kirkuk until Abdul-Karim Qasim’s 1958 coup d’état. The central government in Baghdad rather than
local politics fueled most subsequent conflicts. Any census is sure to confirm the majority status of Kurds inside Kirkuk. They will demand
the right to have their voice heard through the ballot box. But Kurdish empowerment through the democratic process need not mean
disenfranchisement for the local Arabs and Turcoman communities. There is no reason why the various communities within Kirkuk cannot
coexist peacefully again.
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Dr. Nouri Talabany, professor of Law, author of several books and articles about Iraqi Kurdish history. He is currently an independent
member of parliament in the Iraqi Kurdistan region.
* This article has recently been published in 'Middle East Quarterly', winter 2007, Volume XIV Number 1.