Kirkuk

Kirkuk is a city in northern Iraq and capital of Kirkuk Governorate. The Kirkuk region lies among the Gudrun peak to the north-east, the Zab River and the Tigris River to the west, the Hamrin Mountains to the south, and the Diyala River to the south-east. It stands on the site of the ancient Assyrian capital of Arrapha, which sits near the Khasa River on the ruins of a 5,000-year-old settlement (Kirkuk Citadel.)

Kirkuk lies in a wide zone with an enormously diverse population, which has moreover experienced dramatic demographic changes in the course of the twentieth century. The city has been multilingual for centuries, and the development of distinct ethnic groups was a process that took place over the course of Kirkuk's urbanization in the twentieth century. Turkmens, Arabs, Kurds and Assyrians lay conflicting claims to this zone, and all have their historical accounts and memories to buttress their claims. The city has a population of more than 900,000 people, and 1,500,000 in the province.
There is a small Armenian community of nearly 520 people living in the Almas neighborhood.

History:
The city was founded around 2000 BC by Hurrian-related Zagros Mountains–Taurus Mountains dwellers who were known as the Gutian people by lowland-dwellers of Southern Mesopotamia. Arraphkha was the capital of the Guti kingdom (Gutium), which is mentioned in cuneiform records about 2400 BC.

Ancient Arrapkha was then part of Sargon of Akkad's Empire, and city was exposed to the raids of the Lullubi during Naram-Sin's reign.
By the middle of the 2nd millennium B.C. the horse-riding Mittani started settling the Semitic city of Nuzi to the south of Kirkuk and they extended their rule to include the Hurrians and the Assyrians. From 1500 to 1360 BC all kings of Assyria were vassals of kingdom of Mittani.

After Achaemenids had the region under their dominion; in the Parthian and Sassanid eras Kirkuk was capital of Beth Garmai, a province centered in Karkha D'Beth Slokh (Kirkuk). The name "Beth Garmai" or "Beth Garme" may be of Syriac origin which meaning "the house of bones", which is thought to be a reference to bones of slaughtered Achaemenids after a decisive battle between Alexander the Great and Darius III on the plains between the Upper Zab and Diyala river.

Arab Muslims fought the Sassanid empire in the 7th century AD. The city was a part of the Islamic Caliphate until the tenth century. Kirkuk and the surrounding areas were then ruled by the Seljuk Turks for many years. After the divided empire collapsed, the city became a part of Turkic Zengid dynasty for a century. After the Mongol invasion, the Ilkhanate State was founded in the region and the city became a part of the Mongol Ilkhanate. The Ilkhanate region was then conquered by the Black Sheep Turkomans and White Sheep Turkomans. Ottoman Empire took control of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Hejaz in the early 16th century. Turkish rule continued until the end of World War I.

At the end of World War I, the British occupied Kirkuk on 7 May 1918. Abandoning the city after about two weeks, the British returned to Kirkuk a few months later after the Armistice of Mudros. Kirkuk avoided the troubles caused by the British-backed Shaykh Mahmud, who quickly attempted to defy the British and establish his own fiefdom in Sulaymaniyah. The townspeople and tribesmen of Kirkuk, notably the Talabani shaykhs, demanded to be excluded from Shaykh Mahmud's area of authority before he was put in place.

As both Turkey and Great Britain desperately wanted control of the Vilayet of Mosul (of which Kirkuk was a part), the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 failed to solve the issue. For this reason, the question of Mosul was sent to the League of Nations. A committee travelled to the area before coming to a final decision: the territory south of the "Brussels line" belonged to Iraq. By the Treaty of Angora of 1926, Kirkuk became a part of the Kingdom of Iraq.

On paper, the Autonomy Agreement of 11 March 1970, recognized the legitimacy of Kurdish participation in government and Kurdish language teaching in schools. However, it reserved judgment on the territorial extent of Kurdistan, pending a new census. Such a census, according to Kurds would surely have shown a solid Kurdish majority in the city of Kirkuk and the surrounding oilfields. A census was not scheduled until 1977, by which time the autonomy deal was dead. In June 1973, with Ba'ath-Kurdish relations already souring, the guerrilla leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani laid formal claim to the Kirkuk oilfields. The new statute was a far cry from the 1970 Manifesto, and its definition of the Kurdish autonomous area explicitly excluded the oil-rich areas of Kirkuk, Khanaqin and Shingal/Sinjar.

According to Human Rights Watch, from the 1991 Gulf War until 2003, the former Iraqi government systematically expelled an estimated 500.000, Kurds and some Assyrians from Kirkuk and other towns and villages in this oil-rich region. Most have settled in the Kurdish-controlled northern provinces. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government resettled Arab families in their place in an attempt to reduce the political power and presence of ethnic minorities, a process known as Arabization.

American and British military forces led an invasion of Iraq in March 2003, driving Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party from power. A caretaker government was created until the establishment of a democratically-elected government. Since April 2003, thousands of internally displaced Kurds have returned to Kirkuk and other Arabized regions to take back their homes and lands which have since been conquered by Arabs from central and southern Iraq.

Under the supervision of chief executive of Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul Bremer, a convention was held on 24 May 2003 to select the first City Council in the history of this oil-rich, ethnically divided city. Each of the city's four major ethnic groups was invited to send a 39-member delegation from which they would be allowed to select six to sit on the City Council. Another six council members were selected from among 144 delegates to represent independents social groups such as teachers, lawyers, religious leaders and artists. Kirkuk's 30 members council is made up of five blocs of six members each. Four of those blocs are formed along ethnic lines- Kurds, Arabs, Assyrian and Turkmen- and the fifth is made up of independents. Turkmen and Arabs complained that the Kurds allegedly hold five of the seats in the independent block.

A referendum (Article 140 of Iraqi Constitution) on whether Kirkuk province should become part of Iraqi Kurdistan was due to be held in November 2007 but has been delayed repeatedly, and currently has no firm date. In December 2007, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an unscheduled visit to Kirkuk before proceeding to Baghdad, where she called on Iraqi leaders to urgently implement a national reconciliation roadmap.

On 12 June 2014, the town was taken by Kurdish forces following the success of the ISIL 2014 Northern Iraq offensive. Shia militias are said to have about 7 thousand fighters in South East Kirkuk, training in military bases around Taza Khurmatu and Daquq cities east of Kirkuk.
In March 2015, Kurdish Peshmerga forces started a campaign to take back villages in South of Kirkuk from ISIL. Several strategic villages were taken and parts of the Kirkuk-Mosul Road were secured. Peshmerga pushed ISIL further away from the oil refineries.
The Iraqi Army, the Federal Police and the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) regained a control on the 16th of October, 2017.