THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VIII, Issue # 254, December 27, 2006
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
WHO OWNS KIRKUK? THE KURDISH CASE
By Nouri Talabany
KIRKUK'S FINAL STATUS & THE FUTURE OF IRAQ: KIRKUK AS AN ESSENTIAL PART OF IRAQI KURDISTAN -- THE
ARGUMENT THAT THE POPULATION OF KIRKUK IS PREDOMINANTLY KURDISH & THE CITY & ITS ENVIRONS SHOULD BE
INCLUDED WITHIN THE JURISDICTION OF THE KURDISTAN REGIONAL GOVERNMENT
FULL STORY:
Kirkuk is an essential part of Iraqi Kurdistan. While Kirkuk's demography has been in flux in recent decades, this is largely a
result of ethnic cleansing campaigns implemented by Saddam Hussein's Baathist regime. Free from Baathist restrictions,
many Kurdish refugees have returned to their homes in the city and its immediate environs. While many diplomats and
analysts may be tempted to delay decisions about the final status of Kirkuk — whether it should remain as it is or join 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 Turkoman. The Turkomans 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
encyclopedist Shamsadin Sami, author of the Qamus al-A'lam, found:
"Three quarters of the inhabitants of Kirkuk are Kurds and
the rest are Turkomans, Arabs, and others. Seven hundred
and sixty Jews and 460 Chaldeans also reside in the city." [1]
The Kurds predate other resident groups; the northern and eastern districts of the cities have been traditionally Kurdish.
Turkomans later migrated to the region. According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, the local Kurdish population in
Kirkuk was joined by a Turkoman minority as far back as the ninth century c.e. when caliphs installed Turkoman garrisons
in the region. [2] In his history of the various Iraqi provinces, Iraqi historian Abdul Majid Fahmi Hassan placed the
Turkoman 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 Turkomans descended from these troops. [3] Prominent Turkoman families in Kirkuk, such as the
Neftçiler and Awçi, trace their ancestry to Murad's troops; [4] 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. [5]
In the late Ottoman period, Kirkuk was the administrative center of the vilayet (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 vilayet and created a new Arbil governorate. In 1921, the British estimated the population of the
Kirkuk region to be 75,000 Kurds, 35,000 Turkomans, 10,000 Arabs, 1,400 Jews, and 600 Chaldeans. A League of Nations
committee that visited the Mosul vilayet in 1925 estimated that the Kurds comprised 63 percent of Kirkuk's population, the
Turkomans, 19 percent, and the Arabs, 18 percent. [6]
Many Kurds grew crops and raised livestock near the streams and wells in the northern and eastern parts of the Kirkuk
region, but, after the 1927 discovery of oil, Arab, Assyrian, and Armenian migration into the city of Kirkuk itself
accelerated. [7] 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 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 it gives no precise details of the ethnic composition of the population. However, the 1957 census —
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 Turkoman, and the rest Chaldean, Assyrian, or other. [8]
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, Kirkuk representatives in the Iraqi Parliament were mostly
Kurds, with a smaller number of Turkomans. Local Arab representatives entered the Parliament after settlement of the Hawija
region. In the late Ottoman era, the sultan's governors mostly nominated Turkomans as mayors although, on certain
occasions, Kurds also held the position. Later, during the monarchy, Kirkuk's mayors were mostly Kurds from the Talabany
family. [9] It was only during the late Ottoman era and the Iraqi monarchy that many Turkomans became mayors. The first
Arab mayor took office in 1969, when the Baathist regime appointed Muzhir al-Tikriti.
Until 1955, Kirkuk had just one high school, and the majority of the students had Kurdish and Turkoman 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, Turkomans, Chaldeans, and Jews have had their own cemeteries. The Arabs, being a
minority, buried their dead in the Turkoman 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 Baathists sough to implement their Arab nationalism by force. In June, 1963, the short-lived Baathist 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 Baathists and
Turkomans, who systematically attacked ethnic Kurds. Between 1963 and 1988, the Baathist regime destroyed 779 Kurdish
villages in the Kirkuk region — razing 493 primary schools, 598 mosques, and 40 medical clinics. [10] 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 Turkoman 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 Baathist 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. [11]
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 "[l]ocal officials in the south have ordered the arrest of any official or
citizen who provides employment, food, or shelter to newly arriving Kurds." [12]
A NEW BEGINNING FOR KIRKUK?
In April, 2003, Coalition forces and the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga (militia) liberated Kirkuk from Baathist control. Many victims
of Saddam Hussein'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 [13] 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," that is, 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 subdistricts of Kifri, Chemchemal, Kalar, and Tuz-Khurmatu annexed to neighboring governorates by
the Baathist 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 Nouri al-Maliki does not implement the article within the allocated time,
ethnic and sectarian unrest could explode in Kirkuk, the effects rippling throughout Iraq.
A report by the International Crisis Group proposes that the Iraqi government invite the UN 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
recommends postponing the constitutionally-mandated referendum because of the threat that it could further exacerbate an
already uncertain security situation. [14]
There is no need for another envoy. With many Arab League nations and Turkey opposed to the expansion of Kurdish
self-rule, a UN 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, 2006, 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 UN has the 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 coexisted 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 Turkoman communities. There is
no reason why the various communities within Kirkuk cannot coexist peacefully again.
NOTES:
[1] Shamsadin Sami, Qamus al-A'lam (Istanbul: Mihran Press, 1896), see "Kirkuk."
[2] Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2004), s.v. "Kirkuk."
[3] Abdul Majid Fahmi Hasan, Dalil Tarikh Mashahir al-Alwiya al-Iraqiya [A Guide to the History of Iraqi Liwas-Kirkuk Liwa], vol. II, (Baghdad: Dijla Press, 1947), p. 58.|
[4] Ibid., pp. 284, 301.
[5] Ibid., p. 289.
[6] Jabar Qadir, "Kirkuk: karnun wa nisf min siyasat at-tatrik w'al ta'arib," Al-Malaful Iraqi (London), no. 99, Mar. 2000, p. 42.
[7] Hasan, Dalil Tarikh Mashahir al-Alwiya al-Iraqiya, p. 55.
[8] Census Registration Records of 1957, Iraqi Ministry of Interior, the General Population Directorate.
[9] Nouri Talabany, Arabization of the Kirkuk Region, 3rd ed. (Arbil: Aras Publisher, 2004), p. 21.
[10] Nouri Talabany, Arabization of the Kirkuk Region (Uppsala, Sweden: Kurdistan Studies Press, 2001), p. 94.
[11] "III: Forced Expulsions," Iraq: Forcible Expulsion of Ethnic Minorities, vol. 15, no. 3(E) (New York: Human Rights Watch, Mar. 2003).
[12] "Repression of the Iraqi People," Saddam Hussein's Iraq, U.S. Department of State, Sept. 13, 1999 (updated Feb. 23, 2000), accessed Aug. 7, 2006; Al-Hayat (London), Sept. 29, 2000.
[13] "Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period," Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad, Mar. 8, 2004.
[14] "Iraq and the Kurds: The Brewing Battle over Kirkuk," Middle East Report, no. 56, International Crisis Group, Brussels and Amman, July 18, 2006.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
The Middle East & the Problem of Iraq
Page Two
Page One
The Problem of Rogue States:
Iraq as a Case History
National Strategy for Victory in Iraq
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Nouri Talabany is the author of several books and articles about Iraqi Kurdish history. He is currently an independent member
of Parliament in the Iraqi Kurdistan region.
The foregoing article by Nouri Talabany was originally published in the Middle East Quarterly, Winter, 2007, and can be
found on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum.
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
December 27, 2006
Return to Top of Page
Go to the WEBSITE INDEX
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Public Issues & Political Controversies
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
Most Recent Articles
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Volume VIII, 2006
Return to Beginning of
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA,
Subject Matter Highlights
Return to POLITICAL EDUCATION Homepage
CONTACT & ACCESS INFORMATION
This is not a commercial website. The sole purpose of the website is to share with interested persons information regarding civics,
civic and social education, political science, government, politics, law, constitutional law and history, public policy, and political
philosophy and history, as well as current and recent political developments, public issues, and political controversies.
POLITICAL EDUCATION, CONSERVATIVE ANALYSIS
POLITICS, SOCIETY, & THE SOVEREIGN STATE
Website of Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr.
Government, Politics, Public Policy, Legal Issues, Constitutional Law, Government & the Economy, Cultural Values, Foreign Affairs,
International Relations, Military Defense & National Security, Geopolitics, Terrorism & Homeland Security, American National Interests,
Political Systems & Processes, Political Institutions, Political Ideologies, & Political Philosophy
INDEX FOR THE ENTIRE WEBSITE
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic,
Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues