The City of Kirkuk

The ancient city of Kirkuk (population 1 million) is located 250 km north of Baghdad, between the Tigris River and the Zagros Mountains. Due to its unique multiethnic history, Kirkuk enjoys a special political status enshrined in the Iraqi Constitution and is widely regarded as a test case for peaceful coexistence in post-war Iraq.

A Mesopotamian Microcosm

During the past 4500 years, the city of Kirkuk was ruled by numerous empires and dynasties. These include the Hurrians of northern Mesopotamia, the ancient Assyrians, the Greek Seleucids, several Persian dynasties, as well as the Ottoman Empire.

Today, Kirkuk is inhabited by Kurds, Turkmen, Arabs and Assyrians. While the majority are Sunni and Shia Muslims, the city is also home to Yazidis as well as Chaldean Catholics and Syrian-Orthodox Christians.

Human Rights Violations in Kirkuk

During the time of the Ba'ath regime (1968 – 2003), the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding rural areas experienced numerous atrocities.

Up to 100,000 Kurdish civilians died in the course of the genocidal Anfal Campaign (1987-1989), which involved large-scale deportation, concentration camps, mass executions, chemical warfare and the destruction of more than 2000 villages.

The population of Kirkuk continued to suffer from systematic human rights violations until the city was liberated by Kurdish forces in 2003.

Additional Information

Human Rights Watch, Genocide in Iraq (1993)

»It is a land of spring flowers and waving fields of wheat, of rushing streams and sudden perilous gorges, of hidden caves and barren rock faces. Above all, it is a land where the rhythm of life is defined by the relationship between the people and the mountains. … "Level the mounts," so the old saying goes, "and in a day the Kurds would be no more."

In 1988, during the final six months of Iraq's eight-year long war with Iran, something terrible occurred in the mountains of northern Iraq. At least metaphorically, the regime of Saddam Hussein did "level the mounts," in the sense of razing thousands of villages, destroying the traditional rural economy and infrastructure of Iraqi Kurdistan and killing many tens of thousands of its inhabitants.«