ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The residents of two Kurdish neighborhoods in Kirkuk have accused the Iraqi army and the state-owned North Oil Company of pursuing the Baath-era Arabization process in the oil-rich province. This comes after the Iraqi army seized control of at least six Kurdish families’ homes.
Dana Ahmed, a resident of northern Kirkuk’s Newroz neighborhood, told Rudaw he was detained by Iraqi forces after asking them to leave his home and was only released after pledging not to return to the house again.
“That is my house, where my wife and children used to live,” said Ahmed, pointing at his home which has been seized by Iraqi troops. “Three to four Iraqi soldiers are currently in the house, as well as two police cars to protect the situation from escalating.”
Newroz neighborhood’s 122 houses were previously inhabited by members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party. After the fall of the regime, Kurdish families from Kirkuk who were displaced to other parts of the country, returned to the neighborhood. Each house is built on a vast 600 square meter patch of land.
The Iraqi army has made several attempts to take over the Newroz neighborhood since October 16, 2017, with the most recent incident dating back to January 4th of 2024. The Kurdish inhabitants of the area, supported by Kurdish officials including the Iraqi Justice Minister Khalid Shwani and the Iraqi Deputy Speaker Shakawan Abdullah, pushed against the incursion.
Kawa Ghareeb, the commander of Kirkuk’s police forces told Rudaw after the incursion that the Iraqi army had withdrawn its forces from the neighborhood and that the police would be stationed in front of the disputed houses until a legal solution was reached, but a Rudaw team who visited the Newroz neighborhood on January 7 witnessed two Iraqi army soldiers riding an army vehicle exit one of the houses.
“Unfortunately. There are those people inside the army who are ready to raid the homes of Kurdish people, just like they used to do during the Baath regime,” Fakhradin Salih, a Newroz resident told Rudaw.
“Even if there is a court order. They can instruct the police to implement the order,” Mohammed Salih, another Newroz resident, told Rudaw. “There is no need for the army to enter the neighborhood with humvees and guns.”
Arafa neighborhood is the other Kirkuk city where locals claim they are facing eviction.
Dilan Ghafour, a Kurdish member of Iraqi parliament, said the oil company has long been dominated by Arab settlers she described as having “a chauvinistic perspective.”
"All of a sudden we realized that we have all our transferable and non-transferable properties frozen,” Farhad Khoshnaw, an Arafa resident told Rudaw. “For example, personally I have a [bank account] card that was blocked. I have my bank account blocked.”
Khoshnaw claims the order came from a Kirkuk court following a session that neither he nor other Newroz residents were made aware of in the first place.
During the court order, conducted in absentia, the court went as far as handing down a six-month imprisonment sentence to a member of the security forces for staying in one of the houses, according to the convict’s father, who stated that his son did not actually live in the house, but rather went there to look after his ill mother.
“We were not humiliated this much in the past,” said the father, who was displaced by the Iraqi regime under Hussein with tears in his eyes. “At the time we were in the mountains, there was some way out. Now all the doors have been closed,” he added.
The disputed houses in Newroz and Arafa neighborhoods are not legally owned by their Kurdish residents, who have come to live in the houses, also building some from scratch, after the invasion. Until October 2017 when the province used to be under Kurdish administration and was led by a Kurdish governor, residents did not meet any obstacles.
Kirkuk acting Governor Rakan al-Jabouri, a Sunni politician and head of the Arab coalition, has been the de-facto head of the local administration since 2017, following the failed Kurdish referendum that saw the Iraqi army pushing out the Peshmerga from the province.
The province is expecting to elect a new governor after the local elections held in December across the Iraqi provinces including Kirkuk, for the first time in almost two decades.
The Iraqi government in 2022 issued a decree that would allow such residents to officially register themselves as landlords of such houses, that is in return for an official fee.
Kirkuk municipality says they have received 90,000 applications from Kirkuk, but that process has been stalled, the head of the municipality, a Kurd, told Rudaw.
He said the local elections, that resulted in a total of seven out of 16 seats for the Kurdish parties, could help defuse the situation.
Ghafour, an MP from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), whose party won five seats in the local election, claimed the issue is anti-Kurdish discrimination.
“Kirkuk is not the only place where illegal housing exists, it exists all over Iraq,” she said, explaining that the Iraqi army does not follow similar protocols elsewhere in the rest of Iraq, or indeed against the Arab-majority neighborhoods in Kirkuk.
“The North Oil Company… is represented by Arabs, and they have decided to harass the people in that area where Kurds live,” she said.
Kirkuk is part of the disputed areas that come under the Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution. The article should have been implemented by 2007 including a referendum on whether the residents in Kirkuk want to join the Kurdistan Region or stay with the Iraqi federal government.
The Arabization movement was part of Hussein’s Baathist regime campaign against the Kurds, in which Arab families would be resettled in disputed areas in hopes of establishing an Arab majority, pushing Kurdish families out in the process. Kurdish language and culture were effectively banned.
Khoshnaw, the Arafa resident, said with a bitter feeling that life in the past was “better.”
“The Baath government used to forcibly relocate people, but at least they were building new houses for the people and providing financial incentives,” he said.
He was referring to the mandatory settlement built for those Kurdish people who were forced to leave their land and homes in the Kurdish villages and instead to live in the new settlements. Many people at the time were given a house and some form of monetary compensation. The process that emptied more than 2500 villages of its people led to the abandonment of vast agricultural areas that never recovered, not even after the fall of the Iraqi regime in 2003.
While the new Iraqi governments has dissolved what used to be Hussein’s Revolution Council - a puppet Baath parliament - many of the laws passed by the Council remain in effect, some of which concern the disputed areas including the dispossession of the Kurdish people in
Kirkuk.
There is an official organization that is tasked with the de-Baathification process, namely banning people and entities who support the old Iraqi regime.
“It is unfortunate that it is outlawed to be a member or support the old Baath party, and yet all the government applies now are the laws the Baath government stipulated,” one man who spoke on condition of anonymity told Rudaw.
He said his father who used to live in one of the disputed houses died 12 years ago, and yet the court has recently called for his arrest.
“The only thing that is missing, to be identical to Baath tactics, is to bring a helicopter,” Khoshnaw from Arafa said, referring to Hussein's regime which used to raid homes and villages with army vehicles, tanks on the land and helicopters hovering over the areas.
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