Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq

Ba'athist Arabization campaigns in northern Iraq
Part of Ba'athism and the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict
Map of the present-day autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq and other territory comprising Iraqi Kurdistan
Location	Ba'athist Iraq
Date	1968–2003
Target	Mainly Kurds, but also Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyrians, Shabaks, Mandaeans, Armenians, and other Iraqi minorities
Attack type	Demographic engineering via ethnic cleansing
Deaths	2,500[1] to 12,500[1][2]
Victims	2,000,000+ (incl. refugees)[2]
Perpetrator	Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party
Motive	Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism

Between 1968 and 2003, the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party of the Iraqi Republic perpetrated multiple campaigns of demographic engineering against the country's non-Arabs. While Arabs constitute the majority of Iraq's population as a whole, they are not the majority in parts of northern Iraq, and a minority in Iraqi Kurdistan. In an attempt to Arabize the north, the Iraqi government pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, killing and forcefully displacing a large number of Iraqi minorities—predominantly Kurds, but also Turkmen, Yazidis, Assyrians, Shabaks, Mandaeans, and Armenians, among others—and subsequently allotting the cleared land to Arab settlers.^{[3][4][5][6][7]} In 1978 and 1979 alone, 600 Kurdish villages were burned down and around 200,000 Kurds were deported to other parts of Iraq.^[2]

As a part of the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict, the campaigns represent a major chapter of the historical ethno-cultural friction between Arabs and Kurds in the Middle East. Rooted in the doctrines of Ba'athism, the Iraqi government policy that served as the basis of these campaigns has been referred to as an example of internal colonialism—more specifically described by Ghanaian-Canadian scholar Francis Kofi Abiew as a "colonial 'Arabization' program" consisting of large-scale Kurdish deportations and forced Arab settlement within the country.^[8][9]