Kurds in Iraq are the largest ethnic minority in Iraq, comprising between 15% and 20% of the country’s population.
The Kurdish people are an ethnic group whose origins are the Middle East. They are one of the largest ethnic groups in the world that do not have a state of their own. Iraqi Kurdistan (“Land of the Kurds”) is an autonomous region in northern Iraq, covering 40,643 square kms and a population of approximately 8.4 million. Kurdish populations occupy the territory in and around the Zagros Mountains. These arid unwelcoming mountains have been a geographic buffer to cultural and political dominance from neighboring empires. Persians, Arabs, and Ottomans were kept away, and a space was carved out to develop Kurdish culture, language, and identity.
Ethnoreligious Iraq. The Kurdish people within Iraq have grappled with various political statuses over their history. Once assumed to receive full independence via the Treaty of Sèvres, Iraqi Kurds have experienced a recent and troubled history of betrayal, oppression, and genocide. After the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Iraqi Kurds, now governed by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), faced a crossroads in the political trajectory of Iraqi Kurdistan. Factors that play into their future include Kurdish diversity and factions, Kurdish relationships with the United States, Iraq’s central government, and neighboring countries, previous political agreements, disputed territories, and Kurdish ethnonationalism.
HISTORY
Pre-1991. The Kurds are thought to be the descendants of various Indo-European tribes that arrived in the region about 4,000 years ago. Arabs applied the name “Kurds” to the people of the mountains after they had conquered and Islamicized the region. In the 1500s most Kurds fell under Ottoman Rule. Iraqi Kurds developed as a subgroup of the Kurdish peoples when Great Britain created the state of Iraq out of the Sykes–Picot Agreement of World War I. The Kurdish people were expecting to soon gain independence promised in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920, but this was quickly overturned in 1923, when the Treaty of Lausanne established the Republic of Turkey over Kurdistan’s borders.
In 1946 the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) was founded by Mulla Mustafa Barzani that pushed for Kurdish autonomy under the Iraqi government. In 1958 Abdul Karim Qasim made a coup against the British and the Republic of Iraq was established. The Kurds had hoped that now they would receive their promised rights, but the political environment was not favorable. So the KDP began an insurgency against the Government in Baghdad in 1961. Their insurgency was in part successful as in 1966 official Kurdish groups gained some rights with the Bazzaz Declaration and with the 1970 Peace Accord a principle of Kurdish autonomy was reached. In the 1970 Peace Accord, Kurdish cultural, social and political rights were recognized, but these rights were not implemented. They had a period of greater liberty from 1970 to 1974. But in March 1975, Iraq and Iran reached an agreement and Iran stopped all support to the KDP. Their members had the choice between exile to Iran or surrender to the Iraqi authority. Most KDP members chose to live in exile and the KDP declared the end of their insurgency. Therefore, in 1975, another political party emerged in Iraqi Kurdistan, led by Jalal Talabani—the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Since the PUK was established, it lacked cooperation and engaged in violent conflict with the KDP over differing philosophies, demographics, and goals.
From March 1987 until 1989, in the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi military attacked about 250 Kurdish villages with chemical weapons and destroyed 4500 Kurdish villages and evicted its inhabitants. The campaign culminated in the Halabja massacre in March 1988.
1991–present. After the Gulf War and an unsuccessful Kurdish uprising in 1991, Kurds fled back to the mountains to seek refuge from the Hussein regime. The United States established a safe-haven and no fly zone in Iraqi Kurdistan in order for them to develop an asylum away from the Hussein regime. After many bloody encounters, an uneasy balance of power was reached allowing Iraqi Kurdistan to function independently. The region continued to be ruled by the KDP and PUK and began to establish a stable economy and national identity.
Iraqi Kurdistan built a socioeconomic infrastructure from scratch, completely independent from the centralized framework for the Baath regime. Though civil war broke out in the north between the KDP and PUK from 1994 to 1998, Kurds were still able to maintain a democratic and prosperous foundation for their region.
When the US invaded to oust the Hussein regime in 2003, the northern Kurdish border with Iraqi central state was moved considerably southward. This gave Kurds more access to water and oil resources, therefore increasing priorities within the region to establish steady relations with the Kurds. This new access also encouraged more investment within the region, softening political tensions and polarization.
The US invaded Iraq in order to take down Saddam Hussein’s regime and dissolve any threats of weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, however, no evidence of mass destruction weapons was found to prove the US claim. After the fall of the regime, the United States government, with the help of ethnic leaders had to confront three issues: the nature of the future Iraqi government, how Shia representation was to be achieved in the government, and how Sunni re-enfranchisement was to be managed.
Kurdish people have played an important role in Iraqi state-building since the United States invaded in 2003. Many Kurds seek to build an autonomous federal state in the post-Hussein era, however, a solution for Kurdish problems in Iraq was not even mentioned in the 2004 UN resolution that established Iraq’s interim government.
Article 140 of the 2005 Iraqi constitution vowed to place disputed areas under the jurisdiction of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) by the end of 2007. The three phases that were going to aid this process were normalization, census, and referendum. The normalization phase was supposed to undo the ‘Arabization’ policies Kurds faced from 1968 to 2003 that were designed to alter the demographic in the city of Kirkuk and other disputed areas to favor the Arab population. These policies included deportation, displacement, house demolition, and property confiscation.
Article 140 was not implemented by 2007. One of the major problems in trying to implement Article 140 was a discrepancy in the definition of ‘disputed area. Reattaching Kirkuk districts to reflect the 1975 boundaries posed many problems to Iraqis and brought along unintended consequences. In the 2014 Northern Iraq offensive, Kurdistan seized the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding area, as well as most of the disputed territories in Northern Iraq.
DEMOGRAPHICS
Religion. Before the spread of Islam, many Kurds were followers of Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, or local pagan beliefs as early as 800 BCE. Arab conquests, however, began in the seventh century AD, eventually overpowering Kurdish resistance. Over time, Sunni Islam became the dominant religion of the Kurdish people, following the Shafi school. There is a minority Shia population, 99% of the Fayli Kurds and 99% of shabak Kurds Muslim is shia, who live in central and south-eastern Iraq. Though Islam is thought to be a religion of governance as well as spirituality, Kurds made sure to keep spiritual identity separate from national identity. Today, many Muslim Kurds do not consider themselves particularly religious when it comes to adhering to the call to prayer five times a day, but secondary practices of Islam have a stronghold in Kurdish culture – following Islamic food restrictions, refraining from the consumption of alcohol, circumcising male newborns, and wearing a veil are all very popular customs among Kurds.
A minority of Kurds, primarily in the Nineveh Governorate of Iraq, follow Yazidism that combines complex Kurdish cultural beliefs with Zoroastrianism and Islamic Sufi doctrine. It applies traditions of the Abrahamic religions such as the story of Adam and Eve, the importance of pilgrimage, and daily prayer ritual, to more mystical elements, focusing on the importance of ancestry and the four elements on the Earth. The religion is practiced in the Kurdish dialect of northern Iraqi Kurdistan, Kirmaji. Most Yazidi traditions are transmitted orally rather than through written text, making it difficult to source many Yazidi origins.
Language. Language has been foundational to the building of a national identity in Iraqi Kurdistan, for the vast majority of Kurdish peoples speak Kurdish. Kurdish belongs to the Iranian language group and is rooted in the Indo-European family of languages. Sorani and Kirmanji are the main two Kurdish dialects, so internal language factions are not common.
A problem among Kurdish people is that they do not have a unified script for their language. Iranian and Iraqi Kurds have modified the Perso-Arabic alphabet, and Turkish Kurds use a Latinized alphabet. This creates unity within modern political borders but strains relations and effective communications transnationally. This lack of unity in scripture parallels Kurdish cultural history, for isolated Kurdish mountain tribes were often nomadic and therefore had a very limited written tradition
In May 1931 the Kingdom of Iraq, still a part of the British Empire, issued a Language Law declaring Kurdish as the language of instruction in elementary and primary schools and the official language in the Liwas Mosul, Arbil, Kirkuk and Suleimanya. But the Language Law was not fully implemented and schools and Governmental Administration were arabized in Kirkuk and Mosul. By 1943 protests broke out either demanding the acknowledging of Kurdish as an official language or the independence of Kurdistan. After political changes in Iraq in the 1990s, however, Kurdish was increasingly used in the regional administration and education system, given their greater autonomy.
National identity. Throughout the 1990s, when Kurds were given regional control after the Gulf War and a no-fly zone was established, a stronger Kurdish identity began to form. This has stemmed from increased international support and the pull-out of the Iraqi central government from Iraqi Kurdistan. The Kurdish language crossed over into the public sphere, taught and spoken in schools, universities, the administration, and the media. There has also been an influx of national symbols, including the Kurdish flag, a Kurdish hymn, and public recognition of the Kurdish people.
Development of Kurdish infrastructure has also become an integral aspect of their successful autonomy. Previously dependent on the socioeconomic infrastructure of Baghdad, Kurds were able to efficiently build up their region, physically and politically, from scratch. They built a fully functioning independent government autonomous from the Baath regime. They were able to manage local governments, establish free and active Kurdish political parties, and institutionalize a Kurdish parliament. With these developments, the de facto Kurdish government gained recognition for the first time in the international sphere. They have quasi-official representation in Turkey, Iran, France, Britain, and the United States.
Nationalism was also hindered by divisions of tribes, languages, and geography that prevented the Kurdish people from identifying completely as one unit.
Autonomy. With a Kurdish diaspora, legitimizing a Kurdish state is even more unlikely. Many Turkish Kurds have migrated outside of their historic homeland in the southeast of Turkey, westward for more prosperous lives.