Kirkuk

Overview

Kirkuk is the capital of Kirkuk Governorate in northeastern Iraq. It lies between Baghdad and Erbil, while the most direct highway between Erbil and Sulaymaniyah passes through it. This position connects Iraq’s central plain with the highlands of Kurdistan and gives the city military and economic importance beyond its size. Oil production, which began in the surrounding province in the 1920s, enlarged Kirkuk and made control of its oilfields a central issue in relations between Iraq’s government and the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Kirkuk has long been home to Iraqi Turkmens, Kurds, Arabs, Christians including members of the Assyrian people, and a historic Jewish community. Sunni and Shia residents belong to several of these communities. The city’s population cannot be understood from recent figures alone: Saddam Hussein’s government expelled residents, resettled Arabs and compelled some Kurds and Turkmens to change their registered identity. Property losses and the rights of displaced families remain central to Kirkuk’s political future.

Kurdish forces held Kirkuk after Iraqi government troops abandoned it during the Islamic State advance in 2014. Following the September 2017 Kurdistan Region independence referendum, Iraqi forces regained the city in October as Peshmerga units withdrew. Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds Force, helped arrange the withdrawal agreement, and Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces entered alongside Iraqi troops. The change deprived the Kurdistan Regional Government of a major source of oil revenue and exposed divisions between its leading parties.

Geography

Kirkuk stands where routes from Baghdad approach the Kurdish highlands and where traffic between Erbil and Sulaymaniyah can pass most directly. The city is therefore a gateway to the Kurdistan Region. During the twentieth century, Iraqi governments also used Kirkuk as a starting point for military incursions into the highlands. Control of the city can affect movement between the Kurdistan Region’s two main urban centers as well as access from central Iraq.

The surrounding landscape joins Kurdish highland areas, Turkmen towns and Arab farming districts nearer the Tigris. Kirkuk’s oilfields made this crossroads a center of production and transport. The Iraq Petroleum Company built a pipeline from the fields to the port of Haifa between 1932 and 1934. Oil development drew workers and enlarged the city after production began in the 1920s. Revenue from the fields later became vital to competing plans for Kirkuk’s administration and for the Kurdistan Region’s economic independence.

The distinction between city and governorate matters when describing Kirkuk. Communities are distributed differently across the urban center and the surrounding districts, and political proposals have concerned both. The 1957 city census counted 113,989 inhabitants: 40 percent Turkmens, 35 percent Kurds, 24 percent Arabs and 1 percent Christians. In the surrounding at-Tamim province, the same census counted Kurds as 55 percent, Arabs as 29 percent and Turkmens as 14 percent. Those provincial proportions must not be substituted for the city’s figures.

Ancient and biblical history

Kirkuk is associated with the ancient city of Arrapha, and Karkha d’Beth Slokh is another historical name connected with the settlement. Its location in northern Mesopotamia placed it among routes linking the plains with the eastern highlands. The city’s much later ethnic and political boundaries cannot be read directly from those ancient names.

Under the Ottoman Empire, Kirkuk remained significant to control of northern Iraq. During sixteenth-century campaigns, the princes of Soran and Cizre seized Kirkuk and Mosul in the Ottomans’ name. In May 1918, near the end of World War I, British forces captured Kirkuk with help from Christian and Jewish inhabitants. Turkish forces retook it about two weeks later. The brief reversal had grave consequences for Jews unable to leave: they faced persecution under the returning forces.

Jewish history

The first known Jewish settlement in Kirkuk dates to the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century, local Jews traded principally with Baghdad. Travelers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries described a community of about 200 families living in a separate quarter. Jews worked in commerce, peddling and handicrafts. Their presence formed part of Kirkuk’s wider religious diversity before the upheavals of the twentieth century.

The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened a Jewish elementary school in Kirkuk in 1913, but World War I brought its closure. After the war, the Jewish population grew, particularly as petroleum development enlarged the city. A school founded in 1934 by philanthropist Ellis Kadoorie restored local Jewish schooling. During the 1940s, some young people who completed government secondary education pursued further study, and some families moved from the separate quarter into houses elsewhere in Kirkuk. A 1947 census counted 2,350 Jews in the city.

The Turkish recapture of Kirkuk in 1918 brought persecution of Jews who had remained. Relations with other residents could also be hostile, though Kirkuk did not experience an anti-Jewish riot in 1941 of the kind that struck Jews elsewhere in Iraq. The community’s history ended locally in 1950–51, when all Kirkuk’s Jews immigrated to Israel. Their departure was one part of the broader Jewish exodus from the Muslim world.

Modern history

Oil transformed Kirkuk during the twentieth century, while successive Iraqi governments treated its location as strategically important. From the 1960s onward, urban Turkmens and Kurds faced increasing pressure and violence. Under Saddam Hussein, Arabization became a systematic campaign. His government forcibly expelled Turkmens, Kurds and Christians from Kirkuk and nearby settlements, seized property and transferred some of it to Ba’ath Party functionaries. It moved Arabs from central and southern Iraq into the city and other localities to strengthen state control over the oil-producing area and dilute its Kurdish and Turkmen populations.

Forced registration compounded those expulsions. Through a process called “national correction,” Kurds and Turkmens were pressed to register as Arabs. After the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s government expelled an estimated 120,000 Turkmens, Kurds and Christians from government-controlled northern Iraq, mostly Kirkuk and nearby villages. Some expelled families sheltered in a tent city outside Sulaymaniyah. These removals, resettlements and coerced identity changes make later population patterns an inadequate measure of historic residence or property rights.

After Saddam Hussein’s fall in 2003, Kurdish authorities gained practical control of Kirkuk, and Kurds became the dominant political force within the city. The Coalition Provisional Authority created the Iraqi Property Claims Commission to address losses caused by the former government. Its work moved slowly: an assessment in the 2000s found that it had settled only 16 percent of the Kirkuk-related claims it received. The unresolved claims included homes and land whose ownership, return and compensation were bound up with the city’s future administration.

Article 140 of Iraq’s 2006 constitution set out three stages for determining Kirkuk’s political future: normalization of conditions after Arabization, a census and a referendum. Normalization was intended to address displacement before residents were counted and asked to vote. The referendum scheduled for December 2007 on whether Kirkuk province would join the Kurdistan Region did not take place. The uncompleted process left fundamental questions of residence, representation and political authority unresolved.

Kurdish parties nevertheless built strong local institutions after 2003. A joint Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan list won 59 percent of the vote and an absolute majority on the at-Tamim provincial council in January 2005. Kirkuk became a powerful symbol of Kurdish national aspirations, even as the two parties competed for influence. Other communities organized across several political camps. Iraqi Turkmens include Sunni and Shia residents; the Iraqi Turkmen Front’s substantial base does not make it the sole representative of all Turkmens, and Shia and Kurdish parties have also supported Turkmen political vehicles.

The Islamic State’s advance in 2014 changed the balance of control. Iraqi government forces abandoned Kirkuk, and Peshmerga forces entered and defended it. In July, Kurdistan Democratic Party forces expanded their control in western Kirkuk to the Bai Hassan and Avana oilfields. Kurdistan Regional Government officials called for a referendum on Kirkuk and other areas claimed by both Erbil and Baghdad. Iraqi government tanks and supply columns later traveled from Baghdad toward Kirkuk as Iraq opened another front against the Islamic State. Kurdish forces continued to hold the city while both governments disputed its longer-term status.

The Kurdistan Regional Government included Kirkuk in its September 2017 independence referendum despite Baghdad’s opposition. The vote expressed overwhelming support for independence among participants, but it did not settle Kirkuk’s constitutional status. Baghdad, Iran and Turkey opposed the independence initiative. On October 16–17, Iraqi forces advanced and regained Kirkuk as Peshmerga units withdrew without a major fight. Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces entered with the Iraqi army. The loss sharply weakened the Kurdistan Regional Government’s economic and political path toward independence; its estimate put the resulting reduction in crude oil sales revenue at nearly half.

The withdrawal followed an agreement between Patriotic Union of Kurdistan leaders and Baghdad reached under Iranian auspices after Soleimani’s visit. A reported account later published by Iraqi Kurdish parliamentarian Masoud Haydar described an agreement between Bafel Talabani and Hadi al-Amiri of the Badr Organization. It named Soleimani as broker and Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi as supervisor, and described withdrawal of PUK Peshmerga from areas claimed by the central government, transfer of strategic sites and oil and gas fields, and Iraqi salary payments to employees in Sulaymaniyah and Kirkuk. The reported terms help explain the rapid retreat, though they did not represent a unified decision by all Kurdish forces. Kurdistan Democratic Party commanders accused Patriotic Union commanders of betrayal. Soleimani’s intervention strengthened the Iranian regime’s influence in Iraq and exposed divisions within the Kurdish independence movement.

Security

Kirkuk’s mixed population, oil infrastructure and position on routes into the Kurdistan Region have made it a recurring target for armed groups. Violence rose during the years after Saddam Hussein’s fall. A suicide truck bomb near a mosque in Taza, south of Kirkuk, killed at least 68 people and injured nearly 200 on June 20, 2009. The Islamic State later used the Kirkuk area as a major entry point for car bombers and attack cells seeking to penetrate the Kurdistan Region.

In June 2014, days after the Islamic State expelled residents from Tal Afar, its fighters massacred 40 civilians in Bashir, a Turkmen town near Kirkuk. Peshmerga forces defended Kirkuk after Iraqi government troops abandoned it during the wider Islamic State advance. Female Peshmerga helped secure the city in 2016 and reclaim Bai Hassan oil production facilities. On October 20, 2016, Islamic State fighters launched an organized assault on Kirkuk while the battle for Mosul continued. The city’s defense remained tied to wider operations against the organization in northern Iraq.

The Islamic State’s territorial defeat in Iraq in December 2017 did not end attacks in Kirkuk Governorate. Its cells continued to kill and abduct civilians and attack security forces. Reports from 2018 also described arbitrary or unlawful detention of Kurds and Turkmens by some Iran-aligned Popular Mobilization Forces groups, adding to tensions after Baghdad’s takeover. In April and May 2021, Islamic State attacks around Kirkuk struck Iraqi police, army personnel, Tribal Mobilization fighters and Peshmerga forces.

On December 4–6, 2021, Islamic State fighters seized Lahiban near Kirkuk; Peshmerga and an Iraqi army special unit retook it the next day. An attack on a Peshmerga post in northern Kirkuk Province on December 5 killed an officer and three fighters. On August 18, 2022, Islamic State operatives blew up a high-voltage pylon about five kilometers west of the city as part of a campaign against Iraqi infrastructure. Iraqi forces have continued operations against cells west of Kirkuk, including airstrikes. The persistent attacks show why the city and its approaches remain a security priority for both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Region.

Present day

Kirkuk remains under Iraqi federal control following the October 2017 operation. Its political future is unresolved because Article 140’s sequence was never completed, property claims remain unsettled, and the communities that live in or were displaced from the governorate seek representation. Neither later population figures nor a single party’s electoral strength can by itself resolve claims shaped by forced removal, resettlement and coerced registration. Kirkuk’s oilfields and highway continue to give decisions about local government consequences for both Baghdad and Erbil.

Both major Kurdish parties operate in Kirkuk, but their external relationships and local alliances differ. The Kurdistan Democratic Party has ties to Turkey; the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan is closely linked to Iran and Iraq’s Shia Coordination Framework. Shia political forces have built a Kirkuk base alongside Popular Mobilization Forces networks and Shia Turkmen groups. These relationships complicate efforts to establish a durable local coalition among Kurds, Turkmens, Arabs and Christians.

After municipal elections, Kirkuk’s council took more than eight months to agree on a new governor. In negotiations, Bafel Talabani’s Patriotic Union aligned with the Babylon Movement, which was aligned with Popular Mobilization Forces, alongside Arab and Shia blocs. Bafel attended the August 10 session that formed the local government and elected Rebwar Taha governor; the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Iraqi Turkmen Front did not participate. The prolonged negotiations demonstrated how national party divisions, community representation and outside influence continue to shape the city’s government.

Security concerns also persist. On June 30, 2025, three rockets were fired toward Kirkuk. Two struck the military section of its airport and wounded two personnel; another damaged a house in the city. The attack illustrated Kirkuk’s continuing exposure as a military and transport center. Its future depends on effective security, resolution of property claims and a political arrangement that accounts for its full history of displacement as well as the interests of its present residents.