Not “Iraqi Enough”?
The Quagmire of Ethnic Identity Before National Unity in Northern Iraq
Al Jazira meaning “The Island” (due to the two rivers it is surrounded by) refers to a region spread across Northern Iraq and Eastern Syria. The Iraqi portion of al-Jazira and its periphery regions including the Nineveh plain and Zagros mountains have long been home to a multitude of different ethnoreligious groups. Among them there are Ezidis, Sunni and Shia Turkmen, Shabaks, Sunni Kurds, and Christian Chaldeans/Assyrians (Iraq’s oldest continual ethnic group). Each with their own history, identity, language, and ethnic flag (raised higher by many than the Iraqi flag). Under Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime, many of these ethnoreligious groups were forced to hide their identities and assume an outwardly Arab aesthetic and identity. Many Arabs from Iraq’s Sunni Arab region further Southwest of them came and settled in formerly minority occupied cities, towns, and villages of the Iraqi North. Shabaks, Ezidis, Assyrians, Turkmens, and Kurds, were forced to settle in collective villages, which had poor access to water and agricultural land, thus disrupting the way of life the people of the region had lived for centuries if not millenia. Saddam’s Iraq assumed a more outwardly Arab (and slightly Kurdish to an extent at the beginning) identity then ever before, as after the ousting and assasination of…
