Sirwan Mohammed, acting head of Kurdistan Region’s census board, told Rudaw that they are opposed to the decision to consider hundreds of thousands of Arabs who have recently moved to Kirkuk as residents of the province.
“We would not have any issues if these people were counted in the areas they have come from,” he said, adding that Erbil and Baghdad should have reached an agreement on this matter before the census.
Iraq will conduct a nationwide census on November 20. Preliminary gathering of data has already begun.
Mohammed claimed that Turkmens and Christians as well as some Arabs are also concerned about this issue.
“This issue should be resolved. The Iraqi planning ministry says that counting these people in a specific province during the census does not mean that they will be permanently counted in the province,” he said, arguing that this is acceptable for all Iraqi and Kurdish provinces except for the disputed ones.
“We want them to be counted in their own areas during the census,” he stressed.
Kirkuk is a multi-ethnic province that has seen deliberate demographic changes under the Baathist regime’s policy of Arabization, designed to force Kurdish landowners out of the oil-rich province. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, successive governments have failed to fully implement steps to reverse the demographic changes and there have been new population shifts in recent years.
There are also concerns that Kurdish residents who were expelled from Kirkuk in the past will not be registered in the census, but the Arab residents will be.
Regarding people who fled southern and central provinces during the war with the Islamic State (ISIS) and sought shelter in the Kurdistan Region, Mohammed said that they will be counted in the Region and that this has concerned authorities in their home provinces who want them counted in their original areas.
Iraq’s Ministry of Planning spokesperson Abdulzahra Hindawi recently told Rudaw that the census is not political, but is focused on collecting population data.
