The Turkomans of Iraq -- A Minority with Major Impact

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A view of Kirkuk, Iraq

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Part TWO of a FIVE-part series on Iraq's ethnic minorities.

• Go to Part One: Iraq's Yazidis -- A Minority within a Minority

• See Part Three: Iraq's Assyrians -- Four Beleaguered Christian Minorities

• See Part Four: The Ma'dan -- Iraq's Marsh Arabs

• See Part Five: "To Look Death in the Eye" -- The Kurds of Iraq

ALSO: Sunnis and Shi'ites for Beginners (Basic facts about these two sects of Islam)
  

To Iraq's Turkomans, Kirkuk is the center of their culture and and an ancestral capital. Kirkuk is a city of over 750,000 people in northeastern Iraq, in the heart of rich farmlands and 40 percent of the country's oil fields. Turkomans number  about two million in a nation of 25 million people.

On the other hand, the Kurds -- who make up 15 percent of Iraq's population -- hope to include Kirkuk in a federated Kurdish state. The conflict of interests amounts to what Yucel Guclu called "a potentially explosive problem." [1]

The Turkoman people speak a Turkish dialect, whereas the Kurds speak an Indo-European language closely realted to Farsi, spoken in Iran. The Library of Congress said that the Turkomans "have preserved their language but are no longer tribally organized. Most are Sunnis who were brought in by the Ottomans to repel tribal raids. These early Turkomans were settled at the entrances of the valleys that gave access to the Kurdish areas. This historic pacification role has led to strained relations with the Kurds." [2]

According to A. Brega, "the Turks were nomadic Altaic-speaking populations who originated in Mongolia ... descendants of the  T'u-chueh (a Chinese name later transformed to Turk) tribe." [3] Turkic languages (including Turkish and Turkoman) are members of the Altaic language family and are related to Mongolian (and perhaps to Finnish and Hungarian). George L. Campbell described "Turkoman" as "an umbrella term for a continuum of dialects which are very numerous and which differ rather widely among each other ..." [4] The Ethnologue website counted 3,430,000  speakers in the formerly Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan. [5] The Turkomans of Turkeministan inhabit lands that are thought to have been the domain of Iranians until Turkic speakers began to migrate into the area in the sixth to tenth centuries A.D. [6]

Turkomans go by many names: Turkmen, Turkmenler, Turkmanian, Trukhmen, Trukhmeny, and Turkmani. They are also found in  Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq. Their total numbers in all countries amounts to 6,403,533. [7]

A brief comparison of Turkish and Turkmenistani Turkoman gives an inkling of the similarities and differences between the languages:

English:      I        you    he, she it     we     they     yes      no        thank you     What time is it?
Turkish:     ben    sen     o                biz     onlar    evet     hayır    teşekkürler    Saat kaç?
Turkoman: men   sen     ol               biz     olar      hawa    ÿök     sag bol          Sagat näçe? [8]

The Turkish Ottoman Empire made Kirkuk the capital of its Sanjak (sub-distict) of Serizhor in 1534, in what would centuries later become Iraq. By 1879, Kirkuk was a properous garrison town of the Empire, a center of Turkish language and power, where civil servants and policemen began their enlistment. Turkoman merchants ran the economy, much to Kirkuk's gain.

The Ottoman Empire fought on the losing side in World War I, and with peace lost a large part of the land that it had held in the Middle East. But because the majority of Kirkuk and the Serizhor Sanjak were Turkish, the Ottoman authorities claimed the right to keep that sub-district under U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" address. Article XII of that speech preserved  Ottoman sovreignty over Turkish portions of the shattered Empire. Turkish delegates to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 asserted that in "Asia the Turkish lands are bounded on the south by the provinces of Mosul and Diyarbekir, as well as a part  of Aleppo as far as the Mediterranean."

And, indeed, Turkish had become the language not only of the North of Iraq, but also of Baghdad. The one local newspaper was Turkish. Turkoman families controlled the oil, land properties and all areas of the local economy. Turkoman officials and soldiers who had served the Ottoman Empire came back to Serizhor Sanjak after the war.

The British who came to administer the area found no need to speak Arabic or Kurdish, for Turkish was the language of culture and government, making all proclamations in Kirkuk in the standard Turkish language, as spoken in Istabul. "There are 7,000 houses in the town of Kirkuk," wrote H.E. Wilkie Young, the British vice consul in Mosul at the time, "and the  population is not less than 40,000, of whom about 2,500 are Jews and only 630 Christians. The rest are Moslems of Turkoman origin. The language of the place is consequently Turkish."

Yet the British backed a Hashemite (Arab) candidate to rule a new Kingdom of Iraq. The Turkomans of Kirkuk voted not to join the kingdom in a 1921 referendum, rejecting the man who would be King Faisal. Turkey was the nation to which they still felt  bound. Many Arabic speakers also remained loyal to Turkey.

The British high commissioner extended a carrot on a stick to the Turkomans in 1923, with the appoinntment of a Turkoman mutasarrif (sub-governor) and other officials to the Kirkuk government in order. The strategy did persuade the Turkomans to participate in national elections that year, but only under the following conditions (of which the British accepted only items two and three):

1) Non-interference & the government in local electoral procedures.
2) The preservation of the district administration's Turkish character.
3) Recognition of Turkish as the district's official language.
4) The appointment of Kirkukis in all subsequent Baghdad cabinets.

In 1924, a League of Nations commission negated British claims that Turkomans were a separate ethnic group from the Turks of Turkey, thereby strengthening Turkoman ties to Istanbul. Those ties were cut in 1926, however, when Turkey signed a treaty with Great Britain and Iraqi representatives, assigning Kirkuk and all northeastern areas to Iraq.

Still, the British-led government urged the Arab majority to respect the rights of Turkomans and other minorities. A 1931 law made Turkish and  Kurdish the official languages in a mumber of northern districts and required schools to hold classes in the language ofthe majority of students. Under this same law, Turkomans were recognized as the minotiries in the cities of Kirkuk and Kifri.

In 1932, the Iraqi government established Arabic as the official language of the nation, but made Kurdish official in Sulaimaniya and both Kurdish and Turkish the official languages in Kirkuk and Kifri. This was a stipulation of the League of Nations that became United Nations a guarantee in 1946, when the League dissolved. The United Nations organization is still obligated to support this guarantee.

The growth of oil industry in independent Iraq changed the ethnic composition of Kirkuk. While the Turkoman population decreased to only slightly over half in 1959, the Kurds had grown to over a third of the population. In that same year, communists incited an overwhelmingly Kurdish crowd to riot in Kirkuk. With the backing of a Kurdish military unit, the mob killed a number of prominent Turkoman leaders.

When the Baath Party came to power in 1968, Turkomans watched as Kurds argued with the central government about inclusion of Kirkuk within a self-ruling Kurdish zone. Baghdad redrew provincial borders in 1974, in order to break up the Turkoman and Kurdish populations. A 1975 Iraqi military strike against the Kurds foreshadowed Baathist persecution of minorities in the late 1980s and the 1990s. The government arrested Turkomans without cause, exiled them, deported them to other areas of the country, seized personal property and forbad the sale of Turkoman property except to Arabs. The government brought in Arabs to displace or replace the Turkomans, forcing Turkomans to register themselves as Arabs for the 1976 census.

Despite this oppression, Turkomans were still in the majority at the outbreak of the Iraq War. Of the 20,000 Kurds who came into Turkoman cities at the start of Operation Iraq Freedom, half remained. Kurdish militiamen looted the towns of Altin, Kopru, Kirkuk, Daquq, Tuzkhurmatu, and Mandali, attacking the Turkoman residents. They burned deeds, birth records and other documented proof of the Turkoman presence. In an attempt to influence the upcoming census count, 500 Kurds migrated to Kirkuk in August 2004: nearly 72,000 Kurds resettled in Kirkuk between April 2003 and August 2004, urged on by subsidies or threats from Kurdish political parties. [9] In November 2006, thousands of displaced Kurds displaced living since 2002 in a Kirkuk soccer stadium, waiting to be sent back to Kurdish villages. [10]

Meanwhile, wrote Aamer Madhani of the Chicago Tribune, the Iraqi constitution calls for "the people of Kirkuk to hold a referendum on whether they should join Kurdistan by the end of 2007. The Kurds also must negotiate an understanding with neighboring Turkey, which believes any move toward Kurdish independence will stoke unrest among the millions of Kurds in Turkey. Iran and Syria also have Kurdish minorities." [11]

For Iraq to remain viable, added Yucel Guclu, "Iraqi law and constitutional interpretations should address the core concerns of Iraq's diverse communities. To do otherwise, and allow Kirkuk to fester, will undercut Iraq's stability, provoke ethnic strife, and perhaps even lead to civil war." [12]

Sources cited:

[1] Guclu, Yucel. "The Turkoman case." Middle East Quarterly, 14.1 (Winter 2007): 79(8). General OneFile. Gale. Accessed on 
September 26, 2007.

[2] Countrystudies website, web page http://countrystudies.us/iraq/33.htm. This website contains the on-line versions of  books previously published in hard copy by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress as part of the Country  Studies/Area Handbook Series sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Army between 1986 and 1998. Each study offers a comprehensive description and analysis of the country or region's historical setting, geography, society, economy, political system, and foreign policy.

[3] Brega, A., R. Scacchi, M. Cuccia, B. Kirdar, G. Peloso, and R.M. Corbo. "Study of 15 protein polymorphisms in a sample of the Turkish population." Human Biology, 70.n4 (August 1998): 715(14). General OneFile. Gale. Accessed on September 27, 2007.

[4] Campbell, George L.  Compendium of the World's Languages. New York: Routledge, 1991.  Volume 2, p. 1395.

[5] Ethnologue website, "Turkmen" web page, http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=tuk. Accessed on September 27.  2007.

[6] Dalby, Andrew. Dictionary of Languages: The Definitive Reference to More than 400 Languages. New York: Columbia University  Press, 1998; p. 655.

[7] Ethnologue.

[8] Learning Turkic Languages website, http://www.xs4all.nl/~iamback/turkic/. Accessed on September 27, 2007.

[9] Guclu (Source of content from paragraph 7).

[10] Madhani, Aamer. "Iraq's Kurds Press Their Claim on Kirkuk." Chicago Tribune, November 15, 2006, SIRS Researcher Service, SIRS Knowledge Source, Accessed on September 27, 2007.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Guclu.