The Northern Mosaic: Peoples and Faiths of N. Iraq, Pt.1

By now, no doubt, most people who concern themselves with Iraqi affairs at all are not only aware of the rivalries between Kurds and Arabs, but of the fact that there are two competing factions among the Kurds, and that Turkey has a profound interest in events in northern Iraq. (And down south, of course, there are the Sunnis and the Shi’a.) But now that American troops are controlling northern Iraq, one of the most complex mosaics of peoples, ethnicities and religions imaginable, there will be many new complications. So now it’s time for the advanced quiz:

1. How does the rivalry between the Naqshbandi and Qadiri orders of Sufism play out in tribal rivalries in Kurdistan? (This may sound like an esoteric, academic question until someone chambers a round near your guard post.)

2. What is the Assyrian Church of the East?

3. What exactly is a Turkoman (Turcoman, Turkmen)? How many are there? How do they differ from Turks?

4. Suddenly you encounter a dispute between the Assyrians and the Chaldeans. Weren’t those Biblical peoples? What are they doing here now?

5. Are there Kurdish Jews?

6. Some of the Christians and Jews here speak Aramaic. Aramaic? Isn’t that a dead language?

7. The now vanished Tariq ‘Aziz, a northerner from Mosul, was a Catholic. How did that happen?

8. What is a Yazidi, and do they really worship the devil?

Those of you who were able to answer all of these questions easily and without an encyclopedia probably do not need to read further. For the rest, welcome to the complex world of northern Iraq. No part of the “Arab world” is as diverse, except perhaps Lebanon, though even in Lebanon everyone speaks the same language. The ethnic and linguisitic patterns of northern Iraq are such that it is debatable whether it is part of the “Arab” world at all, since Kurdish and Turkmeni are widely spoken, languages from the Indo-European and Altaic families, respectively.

Northern Iraq also borders Syria, Turkey, and Iran, and each of those countries has historically meddled in events in the north (especially Turkey and Iran). And if this complex mosaic of internal minorities and external meddlers were not enough, the region is also home to Iraq’s third largest city (Mosul), vital oil center (Kirkuk), and Iraq’s oldest and most developed oilfields. Those Americans and British occupying southern Iraq have only the Sunni-Shi’ite division to worry about. In the north, things really get complicated.

This Dossier hopes to offer a brief overview. Emphasis on brief: many of these groups and players will be looked at in more detail as time goes on.

Sunni Arabs, Shi‘ite Arabs, Sunni Kurds. That’s Iraq, according to most of the overviews. There are, of course, Shi‘ite Kurds, for that matter Christian and Jewish Kurds, and there are “Assyrians” who speak Kurdish, as well as Assyrians who speak Arabic, not to mention the Assyrians who speak Aramaic. (Some Kurdish Jews speak Aramaic too, for that matter. Yes, that Aramaic, the mostly dead language Jesus spoke.) Of course you also have the Yazidis, who aren’t Muslims or Christians or Jews, but they too speak Kurdish. And then you must not confuse the Assyrian Orthodox Church of the East with the Chaldean Catholic Church or the Syrian Orthodox Church, though all are part of the Christian community of northern Iraq. And then there’s the rivalry between the two big Sufi mystical orders, which in fact coincides with the division between the two main Kurdish political parties. Oh, and of course while the Sunni Arabs on which the former regime depended and the Sunni Kurds are both Sunnis, the Kurds are Shafi‘i Sunnis and the Arabs are Hanafi Sunnis.

Now that we’ve cleared all that up ... Northern Iraq — for the purposes of this Dossier, most of the territory north of Tikrit, including the key cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, and the long-autonomous Kurdish region — tends to create confusion. It is a mix of mountains and the plains of upper Mesopotamia. It is a place where Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran come together. Representatives of three of the worlds’ great language families — Indo-European (Kurdish), Semitic (Arabic and Aramaic), and Altaic (Turkish and Turkmeni) are all spoken in this small region. Islam in both its Sunni and Shi‘i forms, Christianity in its Catholic, Orthodox, and “Nestorian” forms are also found here, and there were once a large number of Jews, though they are mostly now in Israel.

As noted in the introduction, add to this amazing mix the profound interest of neighbors Turkey and Iran and Syria, and the presence of the oilfields of Kirkuk, and you have the conundrum that is northern Iraq. Herewith, a beginner’s guide for the soon-to-be-perplexed.

Although the introduction to this Dossier may have seemed a bit flippant at times, the reason was not any underestimation of the seriousness of the problems northern Iraq poses, but rather an attempt to use irony to emphasize the enormous complexity of the region(s).

And before beginning a survey, one must also intrude with a warning: statistics are unreliable. Exactly what percentage of Iraqi population is Kurdish, or Christian, or any other minority (or even what percentage is Shi‘ite, which all concede is the majority) has been a highly sensitive question in the years of Sunni dominance. The CIA’s World Factbook puts the total Kurdish population at 15-20% of the total; Kurds would put it closer to 25%. The displacement of populations under Saddam — whole Kurdsish villages were uprooted and their populations moved elsewhere, and resettled with Arabs — makes it difficult to be sure, as does the large number of Kurdish casualties in the notorious al-Anfal campaign of 1988.

So: the peoples are confusingly interlinked and the numbers are highly debatable. How many Turkomans or Yazidis there are varies enormously depending on whether you ask a member of the community or one of their rivals. And just as Lebanon has not held a census in more than half a century precisely because the numbers might upset the national power-sharing arrangements, so it may be difficult to collect real data on the size of communities.

Ethnic/Linguistic Groups
Northern Iraq has one of the more diverse mixes of language-speakers in the Middle East. Language is one of the markers of ethnicity in the region, along with one’s religious community. These lines can overlap: the Jews of Kurdistan speak Kurdish but would usually identify themselves as Kurds rather than Jews; while some Assyrians actually speak the eastern Aramaic dialect known as Assyrian, others have Kurdish or Arabic as their first language, but would identify themselves as Assyrians rather than as Kurds or Arabs, and so on.

The major ethnic/linguistic groups in northern Iraq are the Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen (Turkoman, Turcoman). These, as noted, represent three separate language families, those known as Semitic (Arabs), Indo-European (Kurds) and Altaic (Turkmen). Other languages with at least some representation in the region would include Assyrian (Semitic) and Armenian (Indo-European). Anatolian and Azeri Turks, who speak a form of Turkish slightly different from the Turmen, also can be found.

The Arabs have historically occupied the Mesopotamian Valley regions of Iraq, although under Saddam Hussein there has been a conscious effort to replace Kurds with Arabs in areas under Baghdad’s control. Most of the Arabs of northern Iraq are Sunni, though some Shi‘ites from the south have moved north or been resettled in recent history.

The Kurds occupy the mountainous zones from Turkey through northwestern Iran and were, until recently at least, also heavily present in Mosul and Kirkuk, the big cities of the northern plain. The total percentage of Kurds in Iraq is, like most figures, disputed, but is certainly in the 15-20% range, perhaps higher. In the north it is even larger, and Kurds are by far the majority in most of the mountainous regions.

The Kurds are not, however, totally homogeneous. Most are Sunni Muslims, but there are Shi‘ite Kurds (more in Iran than in Iraq, but with a few in the latter); and many Kurds belong to small sects like the Yazidis and the ‘Ali-Ilahis, to be discussed shortly. If by “Kurd” one means anyone whose first language is Kurdish, then there are Christian and Jewish Kurds as well, though these usually identify themselves more with their religious communities than with their Kurdish fellow-speakers.

But while it is true that most Kurds are Sunnis, it is worth noting that they belong to a different madhhab (often translated “rite” or “school”) of Sunni Islam than do the Arab Sunnis who are their neighbors. There are four madhhabs recognized as equally Orthodox in Sunni Islam: the Maliki, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Shaf‘i. The Kurds have long been Shaf‘i. The Arabs of Iraq, like most Sunnis in the former Ottoman Empire, are Hanafi. And among the Kurds, the Shaf‘i identification is less important than alignment with one of two highly influential Sufi (mystical) orders, the Naqshbandi and the Qadiri; this division will be explored more fully in discussing the religious picture in northern Iraq.

Kurds are also divided linguistically. All speak languages in the broader Kurdish sub-family, which is related to Persian and other Indo-European languages of southwest Asia. But Kurdish is divided itself into two major dialect groups, whichin Iraq are reflected in the division between Kurmanji and Sorani (or Kurdi); an even more different branch can be found farther to the east, the Pahlawani. These differ considerably from each other, and each has sub-dialects of its own. Roughly speaking (and there are exceptions), most Iraqis speak dialects from the Sorani group. Very roughly speaking, there is a language divide in Iraq roughly along the lines controlled by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) to the northwest, speaking Kurmani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) to the southeast, speaking Sorani, with some concentrations of Pahlawani speakers also found in the PUK area.

The language difference is not, however, the primary distinction between the KDP and the PUK; not only do the two align with competing tribal groups, but also with competing Sufi orders, of which more later.

Besides the language differences, Kurds are internally divided by tribal rivalries, some of them deep. The dynastic nature of the KDP is clear in the fact that many simply refer to them as the “Barzani Kurds”; and the various tribal divisions of Kurdistan are complex and include numerous historic rivalries. The traditional leaders of the tribes, the aqas or aghas, retain enormous power and influence.

We will discuss further the history of Kurdish nationalism in the past century, and have discussed it in earlier Dossiers, but it is fair to say that the Kurds have long sought to establish some sort of national identity for themselves, but have also been plagued by internal divisions (religious, tribal, linguistic, personal) which have frustrated the emergence of a cohesive Kurdistan. The independent Kurdish state envisioned at the end of the First World War never formed, largely because neither the emerging Turkish Republic nor Britain wanted to see it, but also because the Kurds had long been and remain divided among several countries.

Like many mountain peoples, the Kurds are a warrior nation, and their peshmerga, or “soldiers of death”, are well-known as individual fighters. They have done less well against well-organized, armor-possessing forces of nation states, however.

The third major group in northern Iraq are the Turkmen (also Turkoman, Turcoman, etc.), whose origins are from Central Asia. They are Oghuz Turks, and though their name is essentially the same as that of the Turks of Turkmenistan, they have intermingled through the centuries with other Turkish speakers, including Ottoman Turks from Anatolia and Azeri Turks from Iranian and former Soviet Azerbaijan. Like their Central Asian ancestors, they remained semi-nomadic horsemen until fairly recently, then settled in the cities of northern Iraq and in Diyala in eastern Iraq. Some estimates put the total Turkmen population of Iraq at around 400,000 to 500,000, most but not all of them in the north. These numbers, like all numbers on this subject, are in dispute: some Turkmen say there are three million; some Kurds say only about 300,000. Turkmen advocates insist that Kirkuk and Mosul were once essentially Turkmen cities which have been taken over by Arabs and claimed by Kurds.

Generally speaking, villages are either all Kurdish or all Turkmen. The major point of dispute is Kirkuk, though Mosul is also a flashpoint. Turkey sees itself as the protector of the Turkmen minority, and this, combined with Turkey’s own internal problem with Kurdish separatists, creates one of the most volatile potential points of conflict, as the world was reminded when Kirkuk fell to the Kurds.

Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen are the clear ethnic/linguistic divisions which describe most of the peoples of northern Iraq. There are also minorities, as in most Arab countries, of Armenian or Iranian origin, retaining their own languages; Caucasians such as Chechens and Circassians, found in most Arab countries, are also found in Iraq. These are basically small minorities.

Then there are the larger religious minorities, who sometimes are confused with, or claim to be, ethnic/linguistic divisions. Before turning to the religious divisions of the north, most of which will be discussed in Part 2 of this Dossier, one needs to note that two of these basically religious groupings, the Chaldeans and the Assyrians, are sometimes considered a separate ethnicity.

The Chaldeans are, strictly speaking, those followers of Christianity in its “Church of the East” or Nestorian form who eventually united with Rome to become a Catholic Eastern Rite. Many Chaldeans, though they speak Arabic or sometimes Kurdish at home, like to think of themselves as a separate ethnicity, descendants of the earliest inhabitants of Mesopotamia. Some do retain eastern Aramaic written in the Syriac alphabet, but those in Iraq do not seem to include many native-speakers of Aramaic, though numbers are hard to come by. (See the Assyrians below, who retain eastern Aramaic in larger numbers.) But they are primarily to be seen as a religious division and will be discussed under that rubric.

The Assyrians are a somewhat different matter. Many Iraqi Assyrians actually speak Eastern Aramaic (also called Neo-Aramaic and other terms), and thus have a claim to be a separate linguistic group. They essentially are an ancient Christian people who long lived in extremely remote mountainous areas of eastern Anatolia (now Turkey); in 1915-18 they came, like their Armenian neighbors, under extreme pressure from the Ottoman authorities and Army, and large numbers were massacred while others migrated en masse into northern Mesopotamia, heading towards British forces advancing up the river valleys. When the British finally took Mesopotamia from the Turks, they protected the Assyrians, but in so doing also encouraged them to organize into special levies which were subsequently used by the British to put down the Iraqi uprising of 1920 and other armed resistance to British rule. To both Arabs and Kurds, the Assyrians came to be seen as allies of the colonial power. A year after Iraqi independence in 1932 came the 1933 massacre of the Assyrians by the Iraqi Army.

As a result, the Assyrian population of Iraq has extensively migrated to the West (there are significant numbers in the US and various other English-speaking countries). The relatively small communities remaining tend to speak Arabic rather than Aramaic as their daily language, though there are pockets where the old language is still spoken. One 1994 estimate said that of 200,000 persons in Iraq identified as “ethnically” Assyrian, only 30,000 spoke Aramaic.

The Chaldeans and Assyrians, though they retain some Aramaic speakers especially among the latter, have increasingly become a religious subdivision rather than a linguistic one, with most persons speaking Arabic or Turkish or Kurdish depending on the society in which they live.

The Jews are, or were, another such group where ethnic identity is based more on religion than language. Recently there were reports that only 35 Jews remain in Iraq (a century ago Baghdad may have been 20% Jewish), but that may not count Kurdish-speaking Jews in the autonomous zone. Most Jews, Arabic or Kurdish-speaking, have migrated to Israel, however. Part II will deal with the religious communities in detail.

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