Iraqi Turkmens

Overview

Iraqi Turkmens are a Turkic, Turkish-speaking community in Iraq, concentrated in the country’s north. Their roots in Iraq extend back at least to the 11th century. Turkmens live in and around Kirkuk, in Tal Afar west of Mosul, near Amerli and Tuz Khormatu, and in the Kurdistan Region. They include adherents of both Sunni Islam and Shia Islam. Shared language and ancestry connect these communities, but locality, religious affiliation and political experience have also shaped their distinct interests.

Kirkuk occupies a central place in Turkmen political life. The oil-rich city stands where Kurdish highlands, Turkmen towns and Arab farmland meet. Its inhabitants include Turkmens, Kurds, Arabs and Christians, as well as Sunni and Shia communities. Control of Kirkuk affects local government, property rights, oil revenue and the relationship between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government. For Iraqi Turkmens, its future also bears on the security and political standing of a community whose homes and official identities were targeted during Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaign.

Turkmen political representation extends beyond the Iraqi Turkmen Front. Founded in Erbil in 1997 by several Turkey-backed parties, the Front developed a large popular base and later moved its headquarters to Kirkuk. Shia parties and Kurdish parties also built Turkmen political organizations, while Sunni movements recruited Sunni Turkmen figures. These competing networks reflect both the community’s internal diversity and the efforts of larger Iraqi and regional actors to secure its votes and support.

Origins

Iraqi Turkmens originated in Central Asia and reached Iraq and other parts of the Middle East by at least the 11th century. Across those countries, Turkmen communities preserved their language, culture, and sectarian and tribal ties. In Iraq, their long presence is visible in a northern belt of towns and villages rather than in a single administrative territory. Kirkuk and Tal Afar became especially important centers, while communities around Amerli and Tuz Khormatu linked Turkmen life to other parts of northern Iraq.

The community’s Turkish-speaking heritage has sustained close cultural ties with Turkey. Those ties help explain Turkish public sympathy for Iraqi Turkmens and Ankara’s continuing interest in their security and political position. They do not make Iraqi Turkmens politically uniform. Sunni and Shia Turkmens have joined different parties, lived through different local conflicts and relied on different allies. Geography also matters: a Turkmen household in Tal Afar, a family displaced from Kirkuk and a resident of the Kurdistan Region encounter different authorities and political choices.

Kirkuk’s older population figures illustrate both Turkmen presence and the need to distinguish city from province. In the 1957 city census, Turkmens made up 40 percent of Kirkuk’s population, Kurds 35 percent, Arabs 24 percent and Christians 1 percent. In the surrounding at-Tamim province, Kurds accounted for 55 percent, Arabs 29 percent and Turkmens 14 percent. These figures describe different areas. Later counts must also be read in light of forced removals, Arab resettlement and coerced changes to ethnic registration under Saddam Hussein.

History

Iraqi Turkmens faced denial of rights from the founding of the modern Iraqi state. Before the Ba’ath regime fell, Turkmen residential areas experienced discrimination, Arabization and systematic neglect. Saddam Hussein’s government sought to secure control of northern Iraq, particularly Kirkuk, by harassing and expelling non-Arab residents. It removed Turkmens, Kurds and Christians from the oil-rich city and brought in Arabs from central and southern Iraq. These policies altered neighborhoods, villages, property ownership and access to public employment.

The regime also used administrative pressure to reshape official identity. Kurds and Turkmens in Kirkuk were forced to register as Arabs through a process called “national correction.” Restrictions on non-Arab languages and penalties tied to ethnic registration compounded the pressure to change recorded identity. After the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s government expelled 120,000 Turkmens, Kurds and Christians from government-controlled northern Iraq, mostly from Kirkuk and nearby villages. Its broader campaign against non-Arabs included mass arrests and disappearances; more than 150,000 Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians and others arrested by Saddam’s officials were never seen again.

Arabization remains essential to understanding Kirkuk’s population and political future. Figures produced after forced removals, resettlement and coerced registration cannot, by themselves, establish historic residence or settle displaced residents’ property rights. Iraq’s constitutional process for Kirkuk called for normalization, a census and a referendum on its status. That sequence placed the consequences of Saddam Hussein’s policies at the center of any lasting settlement. It also made Kirkuk a focus of competition among Baghdad, Kurdish parties, Turkmen organizations and Arab political groups after the regime fell in 2003.

The fall of the Ba’ath regime opened political space but did not end Turkmen marginalization under successive Iraqi governments. In 1997, several Turkey-backed Turkmen parties had founded the Iraqi Turkmen Front in Erbil to unify Turkmen political influence. After 2003, the Front moved its headquarters to Kirkuk, retained official Turkish support and concentrated increasingly on the governorate’s Sunni Turkmens. Its large popular base did not make it the sole voice of Iraqi Turkmens: that narrower focus left many Shia Turkmens and communities elsewhere in Iraq outside its principal political constituency.

Shia, Kurdish-backed and Turkey-backed parties competed for Turkmen representation because Turkmen voters lived across different jurisdictions and belonged to both major branches of Islam. Iraqi Shia parties founded and funded Shia Turkmen parties to attract their supporters’ votes; those parties also received indirect support from the Iranian regime. Shia Turkmen members of parliament served in the Sadrist Movement, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Islamic Dawa Party. Sunni parties and movements recruited Sunni Turkmen figures. In the Kurdistan Region, the Kurdistan Democratic Party established loyal Turkmen parties. Four of five Turkmen seats in the regional parliament were held by figures with close ties to Kurdish parties, and Turkmen participation in the regional government was similarly limited.

The competing organizations brought different positions to Kirkuk. The Iraqi Turkmen Front supported a united Iraq and opposed Kirkuk’s incorporation into the Kurdistan Region, while Kurdish parties sought a different constitutional outcome. Turkey’s support for the Front and concern about the effects of Kurdish statehood on northern Iraq’s Turkmens gave Kirkuk regional importance. Shia political forces also established a base in the governorate aligned with the Popular Mobilization Forces and Shia Turkmens. Turkmen political debate therefore cannot be reduced to a single party or a single relationship with a neighboring state.

The Kurdistan Regional Government included Kirkuk in its September 2017 independence referendum despite Baghdad’s opposition. In October, Iraqi troops took the city from regional government control as peshmerga forces withdrew without firing. Baghdad subsequently oversaw Kirkuk’s affairs. The change of control did not resolve the underlying questions of representation, security and property created by decades of demographic engineering. It also sharpened competition among local parties whose communities had different expectations for the city’s government.

Persecution and survival

Shia Turkmens were repeatedly targeted by Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State’s predecessor, and by the Islamic State itself. Tal Afar, west of Mosul, was a major Turkmen center with both Sunni and Shia residents. During the Islamic State’s northern Iraq offensive in mid-June 2014, its fighters drove more than 40,000 Shia Turkmens from the town. In nearby villages, attacks on homes and places of worship added to the flight. The expulsions fractured families and forced survivors to seek safety elsewhere in Iraq.

Days after the Tal Afar expulsion, Islamic State fighters massacred 40 civilians in Bashir, a Turkmen town near Kirkuk. The killings prompted Kurdish peshmerga fighters to move beyond their defensive positions to assist Turkmen militias. These events showed how an offensive against Turkmen settlements could draw Kurdish forces into battles outside their immediate defensive lines. They also exposed the vulnerability of Shia Turkmen communities scattered across the north as Iraqi state forces struggled against the Islamic State’s advance.

In July 2014, the Shia Turkmen enclave at Amerli was under siege. Islamic State fighters had captured outlying villages and driven families toward the town, leaving its residents with no open route of retreat. Local armed volunteers defended Amerli while Iraqi forces attempted to reach it and aircraft delivered supplies. The Iranian regime maintained ties to Shia communities around Amerli during the crisis. Kurdish fighters, Baghdad and other actors had overlapping reasons to prevent another mass expulsion. The siege was later broken with the participation of Iraqi forces, Shia armed groups and Kurdish peshmerga, supported by U.S. airpower.

Amerli had suffered a major attack before that siege. On July 7, 2007, an Al-Qaeda truck bombing killed 159 civilians and wounded more than 350. Turkey responded by flying air ambulances into the town and evacuating wounded residents for treatment in Turkey. That operation demonstrated a practical Turkish connection to Shia Turkmens, even though Ankara’s best-known political partner, the Iraqi Turkmen Front, later concentrated on Sunni Turkmens in Kirkuk.

The Islamic State’s genocidal campaign renewed proposals for autonomous provinces intended to strengthen vulnerable northern Iraqi communities: a Christian province in the Nineveh Plains, a Yazidi province in Sinjar and a Turkmen province centered on Tal Afar. Such proposals addressed local control and security after mass displacement. They also raised the question of how communities with different religious affiliations and political alliances could share institutions without having their interests absorbed by larger parties.

Religion and culture

Iraqi Turkmens include Sunni and Shia communities, and neither affiliation defines the whole people. Shia Turkmens form much of the large Shia population in northern Iraq. Their experience in Tal Afar, Amerli and villages near Kirkuk shaped responses to sectarian attacks and the rise of armed groups. Sunni Turkmens have participated in different Iraqi political movements, including the constituency on which the Iraqi Turkmen Front focused after moving to Kirkuk. Shared ethnicity has persisted alongside these differences in religious practice and political association.

Turkmen language and culture have connected communities across towns, generations and borders. Sectarian and tribal ties have also remained important. Under Saddam Hussein, restrictions on non-Arab language use and pressure to register as Arab threatened the public expression of Turkmen identity. Preservation of language was therefore more than a cultural matter: it was bound to recognition, education, employment and the ability of families to maintain an accurate record of who they were.

Tal Afar illustrates the danger of treating a community’s shared language as evidence of shared politics. Both Sunni and Shia Turkmens lived there, while violence after 2003 deepened local divisions. Haji Abdullah, later leader of the Islamic State after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was born into a Sunni Turkmen family in Tal Afar. He had served as a lieutenant colonel in Saddam Hussein’s army and was held by U.S. forces at Camp Bucca in 2004, where he met al-Baghdadi. His individual path into the Islamic State stands alongside the group’s mass expulsion and killing of Shia Turkmens; neither experience can be made representative of all Iraqi Turkmens.

Present day

Turkmen political life remains shaped by the division of authority between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government, the legacy of displacement, and competition among parties. Kirkuk remains especially consequential because its population includes several communities with deep local roots and because control of its institutions and oil resources carries national weight. Reports from 2018 described Iran-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces groups arbitrarily or unlawfully detaining Kurds and Turkmens in the city. Security abuses after Baghdad’s 2017 takeover added to the need for accountable government and protection of residents across communities.

Local elections have shown both the Iraqi Turkmen Front’s continuing support and the limits of its reach. In Kirkuk council voting announced in 2023, the Front received about 75,000 votes and two seats. The council remained divided among Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and Christian political forces. In August 2024, a session attended by Bafel Talabani elected Rebwar Taha governor; the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Iraqi Turkmen Front did not participate. The episode illustrated how a formal council majority could produce a government while leaving major local parties outside the agreement.

Across northern Iraq, Iraqi Turkmens continue to seek security, effective political representation and remedies for past dispossession. Their interests differ by town, sect and political affiliation, but Kirkuk’s history gives them a shared stake in accurate records of residence and property. Any account of the city’s future must begin with Saddam Hussein’s expulsions, Arab resettlement and coerced identity changes, while also addressing the rights and safety of people living there now. Iraqi Turkmens remain a distinct part of Iraq’s ethnic and religious landscape, with a history that reaches far beyond the parties competing to speak for them.