Talk:Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq

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Hello - I don't want to edit this myself, but under "Background" it says Mandaeans were from the north, but they were in fact from the South of Iraq, specifically from the marshland areas that were drained by Suddam Hussein. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.149.97.147 (talk) 19:21, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Number of dubious and false statements in this article. For example, Mandeans were concentrated in southern Iraq, not the north as the article claims. The claim that Kurdish language was banned is novel and false, and that single source includes other off-hand mistakes. Perhaps it was confused with Turkey's 1980-1991 language ban. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Saucysalsa30 (talk • contribs) 19:13, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Turkification

This article claims that Kirkuk Governorate had a Turkmen plurality, which is a lie! Kirkuk Governorate had a KURDISH plurality because it also included the districts of Kelar, Chemchemal, Duzxurmatu, and Kifri, and also Daquq District is majority Kurdish, Dibs District is also majority Kurdish, Kirkuk DISTRICT was also majority Kurdish, the only district of Kirkuk that wasn’t to an extent majority Kurdish was Hawije District, so stop the lies and thank you. 212.237.122.128 (talk) 11:10, 11 June 2022 (UTC)

"Arab settlers"

Where did these colonialist Arab settlers come from? Makeandtoss (talk) 10:13, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Iraqi Arabs were settled in areas populated by ethnic minorities[1] Semsûrî (talk) 11:11, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Take a look at the HRW reports (and these are just the ones I've added) and other sources. I highly doubt Saddam and the other Ba'athist officials managed to change the region's demographics to the extent that they did by simply walking in while bearing flowers and honey to get the Iraqi Kurds and other ethnic minorities to voluntarily give their lands and properties to Iraqi Arabs. TheDoodbly (talk) 11:25, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

@TheDoodbly: @Semsûrî: Interesting how neither of you even bothered looking at my edit and edit summary. I removed mentions of "settler colonialism" and not mentions of "Arab settlers". The sources you added do not support the "settler colonialism" claim. How can a state be a settler colonialist on its own territory? There is nothing about "Arab settlers" in the recently added HRW source nor about "settler colonialism". Makeandtoss (talk) 11:42, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

There's nothing about Arab settlers in the recently added HRW sources?
"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.  For the hundreds of thousands of Kurds displaced from their homes by Arabization, armed conflict, and genocide in Iraq, their continued displacement represents a crime that must be redressed."
"In northern Iraq, the authorities’ failure to resolve property disputes between returning Kurds and Arab settlers threatens to undermine security in the region. Iraq’s interim government urgently needs to implement the judicial means to resolve these disputes, which stem from decades of Arabization policies that uprooted hundreds of thousands of Kurds and other non-Arabs."

The settler colonialism is mentioned in the context of the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict (there are other cited sentences calling it colonialism, but those weren't added by me so I can't say much about them and you're free to investigate those sources or talk to the editors who added them in); independent Kurdish states had been proclaimed on that territory before and successive rebellions associated with Kurdish statehood are part of what drove this policy, in addition to the Ba'athists' desire to exploit the natural resources in that region:
"The first massive wave of forced displacement in northern Iraq followed the 1974 unilateral declaration by the Iraqi government of a Kurdistan Autonomous Region covering the northern governorates of Arbil, Sulaimaniyya, and Dohuk. The area comprised some 14,000 square miles but included only half of the land area claimed by Iraq’s Kurds, and excluded the oil-rich lands around the city of Kirkuk. In the wake of the 1974 autonomy decree, the Ba’th Party embarked on the Arabization of the oil-producing areas around Khanaqin, evicting Kurdish farmers and replacing them with Arab tribal families from southern Iraq. Tens of thousands of villagers from the Barzani tribe were also forcibly removed from their homes following the collapse in 1975 of the Kurdish revolt, led by Mulla Mustafa Barzani. The villagers were relocated to barren sites in the southern deserts, where they had to rebuild their lives from scratch. By the late 1970s, the Iraqi government had forcibly evacuated as least a quarter of a million Kurdish men, women, and children from areas bordering Iran and Turkey. Their villages were destroyed to create a cordon sanitaire along these sensitive frontiers, and the inhabitants relocated to settlements built for that purpose located on the main highways in army-controlled areas of Iraq Kurdistan. The scale of the displacement of Kurds in the north during the mid-1970s was immense, displacing the entire Kurdish population from an area reaching from the town of Khanaqin, close to the Iranian border, to the Syrian and Turkish border areas around Sinjar. Many Kurdish villages were bulldozed, and new Arab settlements were built nearby. The bureaucratic nature of the Iraqi state makes it possible to reconstruct the scale of the displacement, as many of the landownership records of the pre-Arabization period still exist. The decrees passed by the Ba`th government in implementation of its Arabization policy also exist, as do detailed records of the Arab families that were brought to inhabit the vacated areas. An official of the Agricultural Department in Shaikhan district, located in Mosul governorate (renamed Nineveh by the Iraqi government), listed forty-six originally Kurdish and Yazidi villages that had been Arabized in the 1970s." TheDoodbly (talk) 12:08, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

@TheDoodbly: After a quick google search and your reply we can evidently conclude that there are zero sources supporting explicit mention of “settler colonialism”. Waiting for this material’s removal as per my original edit. Makeandtoss (talk) 12:18, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

The term settler colonialism has also been used for this conflict by scholars. Check[2] on page 65. Semsûrî (talk) 12:32, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

Not enough per WP:Exceptional because Iraq is a sovereign state unlike the Israeli and Moroccan occupations. Makeandtoss (talk) 13:30, 11 February 2024 (UTC)

@TheDoodbly: Should be removed given the lack of extensive RS for this exceptional claim. Makeandtoss (talk) 09:23, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I'll remove it in a second. TheDoodbly (talk) 21:10, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Also pinging Greyshark09, since you created and added the article's initial information back in August 2015 and that's when the "settler colonialist" term was put here first. If you want to explain your sources, then feel free. TheDoodbly (talk) 12:50, 11 February 2024 (UTC)