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Minorities in Iraq
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Minorities in Iraq include various ethnic and religious groups. The Kurds , Assyrians, and Iraqi Turkmen represent the three largest non-Arab minorities in the country. Other smaller ethnic groups include Armenians, Roma, Shabaks, Yezidi, Mandeans and Persians. There are also small Palestinian and Chechen minorities, and possibly small numbers of Azeris, Circassians and Georgians.
Religious groups include Sunni Arabs, Christians, Mandeans, Iraqi Jews, Yazidis, Yarsan, Shabak and Bahá'ís.
Some groups are both religious and ethnic minorities, these are Assyrians, Mandeans, Yazidis, Shabaks, Armenians and Jews.
These groups have not enjoyed equal status with the majority Arab populations throughout Iraq's eighty-five year history. Like the Shi'a Muslims, the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'th Party harshly oppressed these minorities during its rule of Iraq. Under Ba'athist rule, Iraq, despite being one of the most multi-ethnic and multi-religious countries in the Near East, these groups were forced to deny their identities under Saddam Hussein's process of Arabization. The situation of the Kurds, however, has changed since the toppling of the Ba'ath party. The remainder of these ethnic groups continue to struggle against Islamic extremists, Arab nationalists, and criminal elements.
History
The end of the Ottoman Empire
The British invasion of 1915–1918 during the First World War paved the way for Sunni Arab rule of Iraq. King Faisal, the son of the Sharif of Mecca and brother of Abdullah Hussein of Jordan became King. Turkomen were assaulted, perceived to have been leftover from the Turkish and Ottoman imperialism that controlled Iraq from the 16th century to 1917. The ethnic-cleansing began in earnest in 1933 with attacks on the Assyrian community(Assyrian Genocide) which was accused of collaborating with the British because they had served with the British army as Assyrian levies[1]. The Assyrians had been used by the British to put down Arab and Kurdish insurrections during British rule. Although King Faisal was opposed to the massacres, a number of communities were destroyed and thousands were killed. Chaldean Christians were also targeted and many fled to the West. Between 1949 and 1951 Iraq’s 150,000 Jews were driven from the country, an ancient community dating from before the 6th century B.C ceased to exist, accused of being collaborators with Zionism and Israel.[2]
Nuri as-Said, the Prime Minister of Iraq was part Albanian, and herefore a minority, like Mohamed Ali of Egypt.
Baathism and minorities
The advent of Ba’athism did nothing to curb the loss of minority communities. Bedouins were rounded up and moved into developments to stop their nomadism. Communists were killed, and six of the last remaining Jews were hanged as ‘communists’ in 1967.[citation needed] Persians were expelled from Eastern Iraq.
When Saddam Hussein embarked on a war with Iran he dredged the Shiite and Mandean (an Aramaic speaking ethnic group with their own Gnostic religion) inhabited swamps of Southern Iraq, destroying the ancient culture of people who had lived amongst the reeds since the time of Babylon. Saddam also began a concerted campaign against the Kurds, culminating in the gassing of Halabja in the Anfal campaign and the destruction of hundreds of villages and mass killings. The Anfal campaign also affected Assyrian, Turcoman and Yazidi villages and people. Saddam set upon a policy of settling Arabs in the formerly Kurdish area, having read about Stalin’s resettling of peoples.
Post-Saddam Era
The end of Saddam’s rule in 2003 truly opened the floodgates to the creation of completely homogenous areas made up of Sunnis, Shiites or Kurds. The last remaining Assyrian (aka Chaldo-Assyrian), Yezidi, Mandean, Shabak and Turcoman minorities, were singled out for attacks by Iraqi insurgents. Churches have been bombed through the Iraq war in Baghdad and Mosul.[3] In another case 30 members of a Yezidi community was slaughtered by neighboring Sunnis after they were accused of stoning a Yezidi girl who wanted to marry a Sunni man. Shiites were targeted by the foreigners who arrived in Iraq since 2003 under the umbrella of Al Qaida.
On August 14, 2007 a suicide bomber killed as many as 400 people and wounded 375 in villages in the district of Qahataniya(Kahtaniya). These people were members of the Yezidi sect, an ancient sect often called ‘devil worshippers’ by some Islamists.
Ethnic Iraqi minority groups make up a large percentage of the Iraqi diaspora. In the US, they are concentrated especially in the state of Michigan, California, Illinois, and Arizona. Most Iraqi Jews reside in Israel. The Kurdish diaspora resides in Germany among other places. Some Mandeans have relocated to Sweden.[4]
Kurds
Kurds are an Indo-European people of the Iranic branch. Ethnically and linguistically they are most closely relted to Iranians and have existed in Iraq since before the Arab-Islamic conquest. Only the Assyrians, Mandeans and Jews predate their presence, and possibly Armenians.
The majority of Kurds are Sunni Muslims, with Shia and Alevi Muslim minorities. There are also a significant number of adherents to native Kurdish/Iranic religions such as Yazidism and Yarsan. There are also minorities of Christians and Jews. Some Kurds are Atheist.
Under the Kingdom of Iraq, Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani led a rebellion against the central government in Baghdad in 1945. After the failure of the uprising Barzānī and his followers fled to the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, when Iraqi Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qassem distanced himself from Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, he faced growing opposition from pro-Egypt officers in the Iraqi army. When the garrison in Mosul rebelled against Qassem's policies, he allowed Barzānī to return from exile to help suppress the pro-Nasser rebels. By 1961, Barzānī and the Kurds began a full-scale a rebellion.
When the Ba'ath Party took power in Iraq, the new government, in order to end the Kurdish revolt, granted the Kurds their own limited autonomy. However, for various reasons, including the pro-Iranian sympathies of some Kurds during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s, the regime implemented anti-Kurdish policies and a de facto civil war broke out. From March 29, 1987 until April 23, 1989, the infamous Al-Anfal campaign, a systematic genocide of the Kurdish people in Iraq, was launched. For this, Iraq was widely-condemned by the international community, but was never seriously punished for oppressive measures, including the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, which resulted in thousands of deaths.
After the Persian Gulf War, the Kurds began another uprising against the Ba'athists. The revolt was violently put down. During the same year, Turkey, fighting Kurds on its on territory, bombed Kurdish areas in Northern Iraq, claiming that bases for the terrorist Kurdistan Workers Party were located in the region. However, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the fall of Saddam, brought renewed hope to the Kurds. The newly-elected Iraqi government agreed to re-establish the Kurdistan Regional Government in Northern Iraq. The Kurds have since been working towards developing the area and pushing for democracy in the country. However, most Kurds overwhelmingly favor becoming an independent nation. "In the January 2005 Iraqi elections, 98.7 percent of Kurds voted for full independence rather than reconciliation with Arab Iraq."[5] Almost no other political or social group in the region is agreeable to the idea of Kurdish independence. Iraq's neighboring countries such as Turkey are particularly opposed to the movement because they fear that an independent Iraqi Kurdistan would strengthen Kurdish independence movements in their own territories.