Legend & origins
Soldiers of the road
Turkmen memory starts with garrisons. Abbasid caliphs settled Oghuz Turkic soldiers here from the ninth century onward. Seljuks reinforced them, and then the Ottomans did. The job was to hold the great road that stitched Anatolia to Baghdad.
The towns they planted still form a diagonal band that Iraqis call Turkmeneli, the land of the Turkmen. Tal Afar, quarters of Mosul, the citadel of Erbil, Altun Kupri, Kirkuk, Tuz Khurmatu, and on down to Mandali on the Iranian border.
Ottoman civil servants, merchants and poets made Kirkuk into a Turkic literary city, and its castle quarter spoke Turkish well within living memory — a history largely absent from Iraqi textbooks.
The end of the empire stranded them. They were promised cultural rights in 1932, as a condition of Iraqi independence. What they met instead was violence. First the massacre by the British-commanded Levies at Kirkuk in 1924, then the killing of Turkmen officers and notables in the Kirkuk riots of 1959.
Saddam's Arabisation drives banned the language from schools and moved Arab settlers into the oil belt. Every Iraqi census since has been fought over their numbers: estimates run from half a million to three million, depending on who counts.
What sets them apart
A city people between two nationalisms
Unlike the mountain communities in this atlas, the Turkmen are urban to the core. Their identity was built in citadels, coffeehouses and songbooks rather than in valleys.
The khoyrat
Kirkuk's signature art. A khoyrat is a short punning quatrain, sung in a high lament. It started as coffeehouse poetry contests and is carried now by satellite channels and weddings.
Turkmeneli, the imagined band
The mental map of a diagonal homeland running from Tal Afar to Mandali. It has never been an administrative unit and has always been a claim, and it still organises Turkmen politics.
Twin confessions
Turkmen split roughly evenly between Sunni and Shia, and mixed towns like Tuz Khurmatu carry both mosques on one street. After 2014 that split cut along the front lines, brutally.
A revived alphabet
Banned from print under Saddam, Iraqi Turkmen adopted a Latin alphabet on the Turkish model in 1997. The language is taught again in Kirkuk schools, in a script most of the older generation cannot read.
2014 — today
Tal Afar and the broken band
ISIS split no Iraqi community quite the way it split the Turkmen. Tal Afar is the largest purely Turkmen city, about 200,000 people and Sunni-majority, and it fell in June 2014.
Its Shia Turkmen fled or were killed, and hundreds of Shia Turkmen women from Tal Afar and the Amerli area were enslaved alongside Yazidi women — documented by the same United Nations investigation, and far less known.
Amerli itself, a Shia Turkmen town, survived an eighty-day siege on well water and airdropped bread. Liberation brought its own reckonings. Shia Turkmen brigades inside the Popular Mobilisation Forces now garrison towns that their Sunni cousins fled, and Tal Afar is still half empty.
In Syria it went differently. The Turkmen of the Aleppo and Latakia countryside were pulled into the civil war early, under Turkish sponsorship, and their villages sit inside zones of Turkish influence today. In both countries the Turkmen are what they have been for a hundred years: numerous enough to be courted, scattered enough to be overruled.
Kirkuk is a Turkmen poem written in three languages.On the city at the heart of Turkmen identity
Geography
Where they live
Based on work by Dr. M. Izady, Atlas of the Islamic World and Vicinity (New York: Columbia Univ, 2006–present) @ gulf2000.columbia.edu/maps.shtml
Through time
Timeline
- 9th centuryGarrison settlement begins. Abbasid caliphs settle Oghuz Turkic soldiers along the Khorasan road; Seljuks and Ottomans deepen the band.
- 1918–32Empire ends, promises fray. Turkmen cultural rights pledged at Iraq's independence are progressively withdrawn; the 1924 Kirkuk massacre sets the tone.
- 1959The Kirkuk riots. Communist-aligned forces kill dozens of Turkmen notables — a wound still commemorated every July.
- 1970s–90sArabisation. Saddam bans Turkmen education, renames districts and settles Arab families across the Kirkuk oil belt.
- 2014Tal Afar falls; Amerli holds. ISIS shatters the band along its Sunni–Shia seam; enslavement and siege follow.
- TodayNumerous, dispersed, overruled. Turkmen parties hold seats in Baghdad and Erbil but no province of their own; the 2024 census asked no ethnicity question, so Kirkuk's balance stays uncounted.
The third people of Iraq
Estimated population
Fiercely contested numbers: Turkmen parties claim up to 3 million in Iraq; scholarly estimates cluster around 500–800,000. Syrian figure counts Turkic speakers; claims of descent run far higher.
What they gave the region
Kirkuk's poets and pastry-makers
Turkmen culture is urban craftsmanship. The khoyrat is the most distinctive vocal art in Iraq, carried by singers like Abdul Wahid Kuzeci and echoed in the Iraqi maqam, the classical song tradition that UNESCO now protects.
The citadel workshops of Kirkuk and the covered bazaar in Erbil carry Turkmen fingerprints, and so do the kitchens that perfected kubba and dolma in their Turkic registers. The community's poets wrote some of the best verse in Ottoman Iraq.
Being bilingual by necessity, Turkmen have long been Iraq's translators and middlemen: the people through whom Baghdad, Erbil and Istanbul talk to each other.
Looking forward
Between Ankara's embrace and Iraq's arithmetic
Tal Afar's slow repopulation and Kirkuk's still-uncounted ethnic balance will decide whether the Turkmen stay a political community or dissolve into Iraq's Arab and Kurdish contest. Turkish patronage brings schools, satellite channels and leverage; it also brings the risk of looking like somebody else's instrument, a charge Turkmen politicians hear constantly in Baghdad.
The Latin alphabet revival in Kirkuk classrooms is quietly working, and so is the khoyrat, which has found new audiences online — not an obvious fate for a coffeehouse verse form. In Syria, Turkmen fortunes ride on the post-Assad settlement and on Ankara's zone of influence. The century ahead looks like another negotiation.
The emblem
The göl
The octagonal göl is the medallion at the heart of Turkic carpet weaving, and each tribe historically kept its own variant, a sort of woven coat of arms. It stands here for a people whose identity travelled in patterns rather than states. Carpets, songs and citadel walls.
Sources10
- Minority Rights Group, Turkmen in Iraq – community profile. minorityrights.org
- Suphi Saatci, Kerkuk evleri (Yapi Kredi Yayinlari).
- Hanna Batatu, The old social classes and the revolutionary movements of Iraq (Princeton University Press), 1978.
- Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Endangered community: the Turkoman identity in Iraq, 2004. tandfonline.com
- Amnesty International, Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale, 2014. amnesty.org
- United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and OHCHR, Report on the protection of civilians in the armed conflict in Iraq, December 2014 to April 2015, 2015.
- Human Rights Watch, After liberation came destruction: Iraqi militias and the aftermath of Amerli, 2015. hrw.org
- Christopher Phillips, The battle for Syria: international rivalry in the new Middle East (Yale University Press), 2016.
- UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, The Iraqi maqam. ich.unesco.org
- Liam Anderson & Gareth Stansfield, Crisis in Kirkuk: the Ethnopolitics of Conflict and Compromise (University of Pennsylvania Press), 2009.