Kirkuk
(2002 est. pop. 729,000). Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq, has been occupied for thousands of years, from at least the third millennium BCE. The city is bounded by the Little Zab River to the northwest, the Jabal Hamrin to the southwest, the Diyala River to the southeast, and the Zagros Mountains to the northeast. Kirkuk is strategically located as an entry to one of the few passes through the rugged Zagros Mountains and, hence, to the Iranian plateau. Medieval Arabs knew the city as Karkhina, the name that some inhabitants still used in the late twentieth century.
The area of Kirkuk was a region of contention between the Ottomans and Safavids from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In 1555 the Treaty of Amasya assigned it to the Ottomans, and many Kurds in the region accepted Sunni Islam. Kirkuk became an important garrison town, commercial center, and source of petroleum products for the Ottoman army. In 1926 Kirkuk was incorporated into Iraq as part of the new province of the Mosul.
From ancient times Kirkuk was known for its sulfur, bitumen, and oil (naft). In 1927 a huge oil gusher discovered at Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk became the largest oil field in the world until the discovery of the Gawar field in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. Between World War I and World War II, Britain allowed U.S. oil companies to participate in exploiting the Kirkuk fields to encourage American support of British imperialism. By 1935 oil production from the Kirkuk fields had made Iraq the eighth-largest producer in the world. In 1935, 1948, and 1949, pipelines were built from Kirkuk to the Mediterranean ports of Haifa, Tripoli, and Banias. In the 1980s two more pipelines traversing Turkey were extended to Dörtyol on the Mediterranean.
After the 1958 Iraqi Revolution the government aimed to nationalize oil production, which was achieved in 1972. Although the southern Iraqi oil fields, especially Rumaila, became more important in the 1970s, Kirkuk's oil was still significant at the end of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1960s, oil revenue, largely from the Kirkuk fields, provided around 27 to 40 percent of Iraq's total national income, 50 percent of all general revenue, and 90 percent of all foreign exchange.
Kirkuk remained a district of Mosul province until 1975, when it was reorganized as one of the eighteen muhafaza (governorates) of Iraq. From 1975 onward the Iraq government pursued a policy of Arabizing Kirkuk and removing the Kurdish and Turkmen people who formed the bulk of the population. Some 4,000 Kurdish villages and some 400,000 Kurds, a substantial number from Kirkuk, were deported to other regions of Iraq. After the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, in the ethnic cleansing campaign called Anfal, 180,000 Kurds were killed. After the Gulf War in 1991 the Iraqi government heightened its ethnic cleansing practices in the Kirkuk region to ensure that the region and the oil resources remained under Iraqi control in any future settlement with the Kurdish nationalist government. That part of the Kirkuk region not under Iraqi control was held by the the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan under the leadership of Jalal Talabani, one of two main Kurdish nationalist organizations. The partitioning of Kirkuk muhafaza and the allocation of its oil resources have remained unsettled disputes between the Kurds and the Iraq government since 1960.
In 1965, the population of the city of Kirkuk included 71,000 Kurds, 55,000 Turkmen, 41,000 Arabs, and several thousand Chaldeans and Nestorians. In 2000, due to massive migration, urbanization, and ethnic cleansing, it was difficult to estimate the population. Kirkuk muhafaza may have held 200,000 to 250,000 Turkmen, and Kirkuk city 65,000 to 75,000. The remainder of the population was Arab, due to the Arabizing policies of the Iraq government, which increased during the 1990s.
Further Reading
Human Rights Watch Books. (1995) Iraq's Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Longrigg, Stephen Hemsley. (1925) Four Centuries of Modern Iraq. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Marr, Phebe. (1985) The Modern History of Iraq. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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