Kurdish population in Jalawla is dwindling, local official warns

Shafaq News/ The past five years have seen a growing number of Kurds moving out of Diyala's sub-district of Jalawla due to the lack of security and undeterred Arabization policies in the formerly Kurdish-majority town, a KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government) officer said on Monday.

Since the 1930s, but particularly from the 1970s onwards, successive Iraqi administrations have forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kurds, Turkmens (a Turkish-speaking Iraqi minority), and Assyrians from northern Iraq, and repopulated the area with Arabs moved from central and southern Iraq.

The massive forced displacement of Kurdish families from northern Iraq is not synonymous with Arabization, as armed conflict and the genocidal Anfal campaign of 1988 also accounted for large numbers of displaced Kurds. But even when Kurds were displaced by armed conflict or the Anfal campaign, the Iraqi government often ensured that their displacement became permanent and brought in Arab settlers to take over their homes.

"The Kurds represent only 10% of the Jalawla's population," the head of Khanaqin's office in KRG's department of Kurdish territories outside the jurisdiction of the Kurdistan region, Rawaa Samir, said in a statement to Shafaq News Agency, "before October 16, 2017, the Kurds were 45%."

Samir highlighted the mega-transfer of Arab Iraqis into the population register of Jalawla and surrounding towns. The Arab citizens moving to Jalawla from Iraq's southern and central governorates are taking over the properties of the Kurds who sought refuge in the Kurdistan region and other areas in the Khanaqin district.

"More than 10,000 persons move to Jalawla annually since October 2017," she explained, "the majority of whom are Arabs."

"The Kurdish population has become frighteningly small due to lack of security and the poor performance of the security bodies," she concluded.

Jalawla has been the center town of the Jalawla sub-district since its creation with a Republican decree in 1958. Prior to the decree, Jalawla was part of Saadiya District.

In the 1970s, the Iraqi government deported a large portion of the Kurdish population of the town after having denaturalized them as Arabs were encouraged to settle instead, to intensify the Arabization of the town. Of the 28,822 people enumerated in the 1977 census, 77% were Arab, 19.8% were Kurdish, and Turkmens constituted 2.5% of the population. In the 1987 census, the Arab population increased to 85.2%, while the Kurdish population decreased to 12.9% and the Turkmen to 1.7%. In the 1997 census, the Arab population stood at 83.7%, the Kurdish at 14.3%, and the Turkmen at 1.9%.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, many Kurds returned to the town but left again due to the lack of security.

On 23 November 2014, the Iraq and Peshmerga forces jointly recaptured the sub-district from ISIS. A portion of the Kurdish population returned after encouragement from the federal government. However, after the withdrawal of the Peshmerga forces from Jalawla in 2017, Arab tribes relocated to the city, including the Kerwi tribe which was expelled for cooperating with ISIS.