Kirkuk, Past and Present

written by Dr. Nouri Talabany *
Much has been said about the ethnic identity of Kirkuk but, to understand its present situation, we need to study the ethnic composition of the city in the past and to compare it with that of the present. The changes that have taken place there are the result of the policies of the previous Iraqi regime – policies that were against international law and which were responsible for the serious situation in which the citizens of Kirkuk now find themselves. If we appear to be concentrating on Kirkuk and using it as a model for the comparison of past with present, it is because it was the main focus of the previous Iraqi regime’s racist policy.The principal source of livelihood on the vast, fertile plains of the Kirkuk region was agriculture, so most of the city’s inhabitants were craftsmen practising related skills, though there were also commercial enterprises. Others worked in administration or were freelance professionals. The people grew their crops and engaged in animal husbandry according to the seasons but often used out-dated methods. It was natural for there to be a higher concentration of people in the villages close to the rivers and other water sources in the northern and eastern parts of the Kirkuk region, and fewer inhabitants in the part where water was scarcer. Simply by studying their customs an observer would very easily have understood the social structure of the society. However, the discovery of oil brought a great many people from elsewhere in Iraq to the city and changed the way of life completely. This is why we can say with confidence that the development of the oil industry provided the impetus for thousands of Arab families and others, such as Assyrians and Armenians, to settle in Kirkuk.[1]

The majority of the population of the city of Kirkuk was Kurdish and Turkman. The Turkmans could trace their families back to the Ottoman era. Later, Arabs settled there. Writing of the ethnic composition of the city, Shamsadin Sami, author of the celebrated Encyclopaedia “Qamusl Al-A’alam” stated that, “Three quarters of the inhabitants of Kirkuk are Kurds and the rest are Turkmans, Arabs and others. 760 Jews and 460 Chaldeans also reside in the city”.[2]

The Kurds lived, and still live, mainly in the eastern and northern districts of the city but they also reside in other districts alongside Turkmans and other ethnic groups. They are the oldest population of the city and region, followed by the Turkmans. The author of the famous “Guide to the History of Famous People in the Iraqi Liwas (Governorates),” Vol.2, compiled by Arab researchers and published in 1947 in Baghdad, dealt mainly with Kirkuk. It states that the Turkmans were the more recent members of the population of Kirkuk and that their ancestors arrived there in the mid seventeenth century with the invasion forces of the Ottoman Sultan Murad the Fourth who conquered Iraq and expelled the Saffawids from the land. The Guide also states that, before returning to Constantinople after his conquest of Baghdad, Sultan Murad left army units in position to control the strategic route linking Baghdad and Anatolia and that the present day Turkmans are descended from those troops.[3]

The heads of Turkman families in Kirkuk, such as the families Nafetchi and Aochi, have confirmed that their ancestors came with Sultan Murad. Mr. Nazem Nafetchi stated, in 1947, that their ancestor, Kahraman Agha, came from Anatolia with Sultan Murad and that he appropriated land called Baba Gurgur, near Kirkuk city, from which he extracted oil by primitive methods.[4] Abdullah Beg Aochi also confirmed that his family has its roots in Konya and that his grandfather, Emir Khan, accompanied Sultan Murad and settled in Kirkuk.[5]

The Guide gives the religion of the inhabitants of Kirkuk as Islam and stresses their strong adherence to their faith. It points out that the region boasted many mosques and takias. There were also Christian, Subbi and Jewish citizens. The Jews (who were forced to leave Iraq for Israel at the beginning of the 1950s) engaged in commerce, finance and jewellery. The Christians were involved in all the professions. Each ethnic group lived in harmony with the others. Mostly Kurdish tribal people who also had an important presence inside the city populated the districts, sub-districts and villages.

The mayors of Kirkuk were almost always Kurds, notably from the Talabany family. During the Ottoman era and the monarchical period some Turkmans became mayor, but there was never an Arab mayor until 1969 when an Arab from the Tikriti family was nominated by the Baathist regime.

The city of Kirkuk was the centre of the Wilayet of Sharazur until 1879 when it became a “sanjak” and was annexed to the Wilayet of Mosul. In 1918, when the British army occupied the Wilayet of Mosul, the British administration created a new Governorate under the name of Arbil, which was made up of the districts of Arbil, Rawanduz and Koysinjaq. In 1921, the British estimated the population of Kirkuk to be 75,000 Kurds, 35,000 Turks, 10,000 Arabs, 1,400 Jews and 600 Chaldeans. A Committee of the League of Nations, which visited the Wilayet of Mosul in 1925 to determine its future, estimated that the Kurds in Kirkuk made up 63% of the population, the Turkmans 19% and the Arabs 18%. As no census was taken in Iraq until 1947, most population figures were estimates. An official estimate, published in 1936, gave the population figure as 180,000. The author of the aforementioned Guide estimated the population of Kirkuk to be half a million but that did not include nomadic tribes. It says that the Arabs lived mainly in the southwest of the region of Kirkuk whilst the Kurds were mainly in the northeast. Kurds, Turkmans and Arabs inhabited the centre of the region.

Most of the members representing Kirkuk in the Iraqi parliament during the monarchical period were Kurds and some Turkmans. There was seldom an Arab representative until after the Arab tribes had been settled on the plain of Hawija from 1935 onwards.

The 1947 Census gave no precise details of the ethnic composition of the population. However, the 1957 Census, in column 6, gave details of the ethnic composition of Iraq according to mother tongue. According to this Census the ethnic composition of Kirkuk was as follows: 48.3% Kurd, 28.2% Arab, 21.4% Turkman, the remainder being Chaldo-Assyrian and others. The 1957 Census is the only one accepted as valid since later ones were organized after the Iraqi regime had begun its policy of ethnic cleansing by which thousands of Arab families from central and southern Iraq were settled in the city and region of Kirkuk. Thousands of Kurdish families were expelled.

There were only two Arab families resident in the city of Kirkuk, the Tikriti and the
Hadidi. In addition, there were some Arabs working as civil servants or serving as officers and soldiers in the 2nd Division of the Iraqi army, most of which was stationed in Kirkuk. Until 1955, there was just one high school in the region of Kirkuk, where I was a student. The majority of the students were Kurds and Turkmans with a number of Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans and Armenians. Most of the Arab students were the children of the civil servants and military personnel or of those working for the Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC).

By long-standing tradition, the Kurds, Turkmans, Chaldeans and Jews have had their own cemeteries. The Arabs, being a minority, buried their dead in the Turkman cemeteries. Since 1991, however, the Iraqi regime has created special cemeteries for Arab settlers and has banned Arab Shi’ite settlers from taking their dead back to Al-Najaf for burial. Later, the regime even began to change the inscriptions on Kurdish tombstones to Arabic in an attempt to prove that there have been Arabs in Kirkuk for many, many years!

According to the Guide, the Tikriti family is the main Arab family of Kirkuk. The head of the family, Mr.Mazher Al-Tikriti, tells how their great grandfather, Shebib, came from Syria in 1048 Hejri with the Ottoman Sultan Murad the Fourth, as did the ancestors of the Turkmans. As a reward for their help, the Sultan gave the Al-Tikriti family villages and lands in the south-west of Kirkuk and in the small city of Tikrit.[6]

Other Arab tribes who settled in Kirkuk during the monarchical period are the Al-Ubaid and the Al-Jiburi. The Al-Ubaid came from the north-west of Mosul when they were forced out of that area by the Arab Al-Shamar tribe. They settled on the plain of Dialah where they were in continuous conflict with the Arabs of the Al-Aza tribe.[7] To resolve the disputes between them, the cabinet of Yasin Al-Hashimi decided, in 1935, to settle them in the Hawija district after water from the Lower Zab River was used to irrigate the land. The settlement of the Al-Ubaid and Al-Jiburi tribes was the first Arab settlement in the Kirkuk region. Previously, the area was semi-desert and was used by the Kurds only in springtime as grazing ground for their sheep. Generally, relations between Kurds, Turkmans and even the new Arabs of Hawija and other ethnic minority groups were good until the Baath party seized power in 1963.

The new regime used the militia of the “Popular Guard”, who were mainly Arab Baathists and Turkmans, to attack the Kurds. They concentrated their efforts on the poor areas where they destroyed all the homes. In June 1963, the Baathist regime was responsible for the destruction of 13 Kurdish villages around Kirkuk. The populations of a further 34 Kurdish villages in the Dubz district near Kirkuk were forced to leave and Arabs from central and southern Iraq were brought in and settled in their place. Between 1963 and 1988, the Baathist regime destroyed a total of 779 Kurdish villages in the Kirkuk region and obliterated their cemeteries. There had been 493 primary schools, 598 mosques and 40 small medical centres in these villages.[8] Orchards and farms were burnt, cattle confiscated and wells blown up. The obvious purpose of this destruction was the eradication of all evidence of any habitation. In all, 37,726 Kurdish families were forced out of their villages and, at a conservative estimate; there were at least 5 to 7 people in the average Kurdish rural family.

During the Iraq/Iran war, the Iraqi Regime also destroyed about ten Shi’ite Turkman villages in the south of Kirkuk.

Inside the city of Kirkuk, the Iraqi regime has taken many measures to force the Kurds to leave. Oil company employees, civil servants and even teachers have been transferred to southern and central Iraq. City streets and schools have been renamed in Arabic and businesses forced to adopt Arab names. Kurds are not allowed to sell their properties to anyone other than Arabs and are forbidden to buy other property. Thousands of residential units have been built for new Arabs and given Arabic names. The historic citadel, with its mosques and ancient church has been demolished. Tens of thousands of Arab families have been brought in to the city and given housing and employment.

These measures were intensified after the Gulf War of 1991. The regime has prevented most of the Kurds who fled their homes during the uprising of that year from returning. In 1996, before the preparation of the 1997 Census, a so-called “Identity Law” was passed, by which Kurds and other non-Arabs were required to register themselves as Arab. Anyone refusing to do so was expelled to the liberated part of Iraqi Kurdistan or to southern Iraq. In its 2003 Report, Human Rights Watch estimated that, since 1991, between 120,000 and 200,000 non-Arabs have been forcibly expelled from the Kirkuk region.[9]

That situation continued until the fall of the Baathist regime in April 2003, when the city of Kirkuk was liberated. Those who were forcibly expelled wanted to return to their homes and land, but many obstacles have prevented this. However, thousands of families have returned to Kirkuk, but continue to live in tents in a very bad situation.

When the Transitional Administrative Law was approved, article 58 aimed to resolve the problem of Kirkuk by creating mechanisms to normalise the situation in the city. However, both the governments of Dr. Allawi and Dr. Jaafari have done nothing to implement Article 58. This has created suspicion amongst the Kurds against the central Iraqi government. Article 140 of the new Iraqi constitution has adopted Article 58 of the TAL, and set a deadline for its implementation for 2007. If the new government of Iraq is not going to implement the article within this deadline, it means that the issue of Kirkuk is not going to be resolved, with dangerous consequences for the future of Iraq.
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Prof. Dr. Nouri Talabany is an expert of international law and an independent member of the Parlament of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Academy of Science in Erbil. He has published extensive research among others on the Kirkuk question.


* This paper was presented to a conference concerning the Kirkuk issue, organized in London in July, 2005.
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[1]. Abdul Majid Fahmi Hassan, “Daleel Taarihk Mashaheer Al Alwiat Al Iraqiah / A Guide to the History of Famous People of the Iraqi Liwas”, Vol. II, Liwa Kirkuk, Dijla Press, Baghdad 1947, p. 55.
[2] Shamsadin Sami, Qamus Al-A’alam, Istanbul, Mihran Press, 1315 Hi/1896.
3 Abdulmajid F. Hassan, ibid. P.58.
4 Ibid. p 284.
[5]Ibid. P.301
[6] Ibid. p. 289.
[7] Ibid. p. 339.
[8] Nouri Talabany, Arabization of the Kirkuk Region, First edi. Kurdistan Studies Press, Uppsala, Sweden 2001, p. 94.
[9] Appeal from the Federation of the Kurdish Organizations against Ethnic Cleansing based in London addressed to Mr. Kofi Annan and others, dated 3rd February 2003.