Turkmen (Iraq)

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This article or section needs revision: This article has been moved from Turkmeneli on Turkmen in Iraq to Turkmen (Iraq) . These renaming evidently also reflect a shift in the subject matter of the article, but this has remained incomplete. What should the article cover? The Turkmen of Iraq? (provided they form a distinct ethnic community) The situation of the Turkmens in Iraq? Or a country called Turkmeneli, be it a real name or a political project?
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The main settlement area of ​​the Iraqi Turkmen.

The Turkmen or Turkomans of Iraq are a Turkic-speaking ethnic group in what is now Iraq and can be assigned to the Turkomans of the Near East. They are the third largest ethnic group in Iraq after Arabs and Kurds with an estimated 5% or, according to the 1958 census, 9% . According to Turkmen information, 2.5 million Turkmens currently live in Iraq and Syria ( Turkmen in Syria ), but their number is declining due to flight, terror and war. The Turkmen capitals of Iraq are Kirkuk and Mosul . The Iraqi Turkmens speak several dialects, which some authors refer to as Iraqi-Turkish and others assign them to South Azerbaijani. They use today's Turkey-Turkish as the written language . Despite the name given, there is no direct connection with the modern state of Turkmenistan .

Settlement area

Iraqi Turkmen folk dancers.
Iraqi Turkmen girl in traditional Turkish costume.

The Turkmen call their settlement area in northern Iraq Turkmeneli ("Land of the Turkmen"). The city with a large Turkmen population is Kirkuk . The homeland of the long oppressed Turkish population of Iraq has long been perceived by the world as the "Kurdish part of Iraq". Although the 1932 declaration on Iraq's independence granted the Turkmens and the Kurds the same legal status, Saddam Hussein's Baath Party gave the Kurds the status of a founding nation (see also the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan ), while the Turkmens returned to minority status . Türkmeneli extends from the northwestern city of Zaxo in the Dahuk Governorate near the Iraqi- Turkish border in the form of a strip to the southeastern city of Mandali in the Diyala Governorate near the Iraqi- Iranian border. At around 90,000 square kilometers, the area is slightly larger than Bavaria , and around six million people live in the entire area. According to British sources, the majority of the population of Erbil in 1919 was still Turkmen and not Kurdish.

Turkmeneli population

In Turkmeneli, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group. The second largest ethnic group is made up of Turkomans. Around 80% of the roughly 2 million Iraqi Turkomans live in Turkmeneli. There are also Arabs and Assyrians who live mainly in the south of Turkmeneli. The Turkomans represent significant minorities, especially in the large cities of Tal Afar with around 200,000 people, in Kirkuk with around 150,000 people and in Arbil and Mosul with around 100,000 people each. The Kurds speak various Kurdish dialects such as Kurmanji , Sorani and South Kurdish . The Turkomans, on the other hand, speak Azerbaijani dialects and use Turkey-Turkish as their written language. The Assyrians usually speak neo-Aramaic dialects . In addition to their mother tongue, all ethnic groups usually also speak Arabic .

history

Flag of the Turkoman people

The once fully nomadic Turkmens formed around the 10th century in Central Asia. From the 11th century the Oghuz Turkmen conquered Persia, parts of Anatolia and Mesopotamia and formed the great empire of the Seljuks . The rise of the Turkmens in the 14th century is related to the decline of any state authority after the fall of the Ilkhans . Under Uzun Hasan (reigned 1453–1478) the Aq Qoyunlu , a Turkmen tribal federation, rose to prominence after defeating the Qara Qoyunlu under Jahan Shah in 1467 and conquering their empire in Iran , Azerbaijan and Iraq. In his time the borders of the empire stretched from the Caspian Sea to Syria and from Azerbaijan to Baghdad . In the centuries that followed, the Turkmens lived under Safavid and Ottoman rule.

Establishment of the state of Iraq

In the 20th century the population of Turkmeneli fell victim to a number of massacres. The Assyrians and Turkomans were mostly affected . During the Levi massacre on May 4, 1924, nearly 100 Turkomans were killed by British soldiers in a confrontation with Assyrians in the Kirkuk bazaar . In 1933, several thousand Assyrians were killed in various villages in Northern Iraq in the Semile massacre . The particularly affected village of Semile gave its name to the massacre. On July 14, 1959, the celebrations marking the first anniversary of the fall of the Iraqi monarchy in Kirkuk led to clashes between ethnic groups, which resulted in many deaths among the city's population. The Turkmen parties commemorate this day. The Altin Köprü massacre was the second major massacre of Turkoman people and took place on March 28, 1991 in the village of Altin Köprü , which lies between the cities of Kirkuk and Arbil . 102 residents were killed.

Since the early 1900s, the Mosul question has been a special occasion for ethnic conflicts between Arabs , Kurds and Turkomans, as Mosul and its surrounding area is important because of its oil reserves . After the occupation of Iraq in 2003 , Turkmeneli was largely occupied by the United States Armed Forces and a small part by the Polish Armed Forces . The fundamental dispute over the affiliation of different areas with significant Turkmen shares often led to crises between the Kurdish regional government and the Turkmen over the years. When the Iraq crisis broke out in 2014, ISIS conquered large areas of northern Iraq. Turkmen cities like Tal Afar were conquered and other places like Kirkuk, Tuz Churmatu and Amerli were threatened or besieged. The Shiite Turkmens suffered greatly from IS, which propagated a Salafist-Sunni ideology. The Shiite Turkmens organized themselves for the reconquest in the Iraqi army or the militia al-Hashd asch-Sha'bī .

politics

The Turkmen are organized in various parties, some of which are based on ethnic and some on religious principles. There are also Turkmen parties that are close to the Iraqi central government in Baghdad and those that support the Kurdish regional government. Others, in turn, make specifically Turkmen politics and, like the Turkmen Front in Iraq, are supported by Turkey. The "division" of the Turkmens became evident in the last few years in the fight against IS, where the Turkmens fought as part of various armies and militias.

Well-known Iraqi Turkmen

literature

Web links

Commons : Türkmeneli  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 35 °  N , 44 °  E

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ethics and Public Policy Center ( Memento from May 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Since the Turkmen are, for all intents and purposes, leftovers from the Ottoman days and are basically Turkish both ethnically and linguistically, the Turkish government feels very attached to them and finds it politically convenient to exaggerate the attachment.
  2. ↑ The Turkomans of Iraq as A Factor in Turkish Foreign Policy: Socio-Political and Demographic Perspectives (PDF; 301 kB)
  3. ^ Ethics and Public Policy Center ( Memento from May 16, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) [1] In that 1958 census, the Turkmen were 9 percent of the population of Iraq.
  4. ↑ Heidi Stein. 2010. "Optative versus voluntary imperative in Iranian-Turkish texts". In Turcology in Mainz , edited by Hendrik Boeschoten and Julian Rentzsch . Otto Harrassowitz Verlag , p.244. ISBN 978-3447061131
  5. ↑ Map: "The Turkic Language Family" , Turkic Languages ​​(journal)
  6. ↑ Lars Johanson. 2002. Türk Dili Haritası Üzerinde Keşifler . Graphic artist Yayınları, pp.21–22. ISBN 9759334488
  7. ^ Christiane Bulut. 1999. "Classifying characteristics of Iraqi Turkish", Orientalia Suecana , Vol. 48, pp.5-27
  8. ↑ ethnologue.com
  9. ^ Christiane Bulut. 2018. "Iraq-Turkic". In The Languages ​​and Linguistics of Western Asia: An Areal Perspective , edited by Geoffrey Haig and Geoffrey Khan. Walter de Gruyter , p.357. ISBN 978-3110421682
  10. ↑ so z. B. the Iraqi Turkmen Human Rights Research Foundation ( website )
  11. ↑ Letter from the Iraqi Turkmen Human Rights Research Foundation ( MS Word ; 104 kB) - The Turkmen of Iraq live mainly in a region called Turkmeneli, which stretches from the north-west to the east at the middle of Iraq. They are found in the following provinces: Mosul, Erbil, Kerkuk, Salah al-Din, Diyala, Kut and Baghdad. The city of Kerkuk is a well-known Turkmen city and thought-out by the Turkmen as their capital city.
  12. ↑ Paul Rich on his new edition of Hay's Two Years in Kurdistan , pages vii and viii - Because Hay writes at length not only about the Kurds but about the long-oppressed Turkish population of what is generally viewed as the Kurdish part of Iraq, he is now being quoted by Turkish partisans. […] Increasingly there are ethnic Turks in parts of Iraq who fear the rise of Kurdish nationalism
  13. ^ Hari S. Vasudevan, Academy of Third World Studies The global politics of the Iraq crisis and India's options , p. 292
  14. ↑ a b c H. Tarık Oğuzlu: The Turkomans of Iraq as a factor in Turkish foreign policy: Socio-political and demographic perspectives . Ankara 2001. (English)
  15. ↑ Mesut Yeğen: İngiliz Belgelerinde Kürdistan 1918 - 1958 (dt .: Kurdistan in British documents 1918 - 1958) . Dipnot Yayınları, Ankara 2012, ISBN 978-6-05441251-8 , p. 124 (Turkish).
  16. ↑ a b Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları Vakfı: Tarih: Türk Dünyası tarih ve kältür dergisi . Ankara 2005. (Turkish)