Fahmi Burhan, head of the Kurdistan Region's board for disputed territories, said during a conference in Sulaimani on Sunday that Rakan al-Jabouri, who became acting governor of Kirkuk in 2017 following the withdrawal of Peshmerga forces from the city, “brought nearly 600 thousand Arabs to Kirkuk city. He also established nearly nine neighborhoods in Kirkuk city” between 2017 to 2024.
Jabouri’s reign ended in August after a Kurdish governor was appointed to the position.
“We cannot be sure that these people will not have an impact on the future of this city,” noted Burhan.
A census will be conducted in all Iraq on November 20, but Kurds fear that it could be used for political gains against them in the future, especially in disputed areas like Kirkuk.
The ethnicity question had been a key obstacle to conducting a census between Baghdad and Erbil. In April, Iraq said it would carry out the census without surveying its citizens on their ethnicities.
Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Kirkuk when Iraqi forces attacked Peshmerga and forced them to withdraw following the 2017 independence referendum in the Kurdistan Region and the disputed areas under Kurdish rule. Most of them have not returned.
Burhan called on them to return to the city before the census, adding that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) will facilitate their return.
“We are the owners of the house and when someone knocks on the door of the owner of the house, it should not be opened by a guest,” he said.
“We are not against the census and we believe that it is a necessity… but becasse the issues of these areas have not been settled we would love to see it postponed in these areas until at least the Article 140 is implemented,” he noted, referring to an article in the Iraqi Constitution that calls for normalization steps in the disputed areas, including the return of lands and properties to their original owners.
The Kurdish official also said that hundreds of thousands of Kurds have fled Kirkuk.
“More than 200 thousand families have left Kirkuk due to Arabization and expulsion policy. After 2017, nearly 62,000 Yazidis have left Shingal. This is a significant issue for us and these are big numbers,” he said.
Shingal is the homeland of Yazidis in Nineveh province.
People from the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, as well as other areas disputed between the federal Iraqi government and the KRG will be required to return to their hometowns during the census period, Shwan Jabar, assistant director of the population census in the Kurdistan Region, told Rudaw on Saturday.
Census teams will visit households across the Kurdistan Region to record data between November 16-19, according to Jabar.
“On November 20 and 21, enumerators will visit the households and review the data,” Jabar noted, with a curfew set to take place across Iraq and the Kurdistan Region during the two days.
