ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Residents of a neighborhood in the disputed city of Kirkuk are worried about being excluded in the upcoming census as household mapping officials have skipped parts of the area.
"They have come to this side, but they say this other side is in a red zone. What does 'red zone' even mean? I do not know. So far, no one has come to do the counting."Abdulqadir Nasraddin, a resident of Kirkuk’s Panja Ali neighborhood, told Rudaw.
Panja Ali, a predominantly Kurdish neighborhood, is made up mainly of the families of internally displaced persons (IDPs) who returned to the city after the fall of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. The neighborhood is divided into 184 blocks.
“We asked them ‘why are you not working in these areas?’ They said ‘these will be covered by other teams.’ After they passed us by, they went to the other sides and finished it all,” said Sadraddin Hussein, a Kirkuk native who was in the city during the 1957 census.
In early October, the census process began in the Kurdistan Region, sparking concerns among Kurds about potential demographic shifts in disputed areas and complications regarding the status of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.
However, a ministry official stressed that no place will be excluded in the census.
“No place will be excluded, and the committees will visit them,” Mustafa Akram, director of Kirkuk’s statistics and planning board in the Iraqi planning ministry, said in response to Rudaw’s request for comments.
Rudaw has learned that around 80 percent of household mapping is completed in Kirkuk.
The census will be Iraq’s first general population count since 1997 and the first to include the provinces in the Kurdistan Region since 1987.
Kurds have been forced out of oil-rich Kirkuk and other disputed areas through Baathist-era Arabization processes and the events of October 17, 2017, when Iraqi federal forces took control of Kirkuk and the disputed areas from Kurdish Peshmerga forces.
Due to demographic changes in the disputed territories, Kurdish officials have suggested that a census conducted in 1957 could be useful in places like Kirkuk.
“If we go back to 1957, Kurds in Kirkuk and the disputed territories were 48 percent, but in [19]97, that percentage dropped to 21 percent, and our Turkmen brothers went from 21 percent to 6 percent. Our Arab brothers, I believe, from 21 percent were increased to 72 percent,” Shwan Jabar, assistant director of the population census in the Kurdistan Region, told Rudaw last month.
Kirkuk is a multi-ethnic province that has seen deliberate demographic change 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.
Hardi Mohammed and Soran Hussein contributed to this report.
