Yezidi Town Recovers From Arabization
Shangal, a town in Nineveh province, has overcome the Baath regime’s Arabization campaign and created one of the few areas in Iraq run by Yezidis.
Yezidis, a religious minority who are ethnic Kurds, primarily live in the western province of Nineveh which is home to most of Iraq’s ethnic and religious minorities.
Shangal became an official administrative district in 1922. Its first mayor, Ibrahim Bakir Afendi, and the 41 mayors who followed him were all Arabs, as were the police chiefs. Yezidi and Muslim Kurds, who were persecuted under Saddam Hussein’s regime, never held an official post.
Shangal’s first population shift of the twentieth century occurred in 1940, when the Iraqi government gave Bir Qasim, a village of the Aldikh Yezidi Kurdish tribe, to the Al Rashid Arab tribe.
The Baathist campaign known as Arabization, which changed the demographics of Kurdish and Shiite areas, impacted Shangal. Sheikh Haji Simo, a journalist and expert on Shangal’s history, said, “The Baathist regime brought more than 800 Arab families of the Hawas Sdedi tribe from Hawija and settled them around Shingal.”
In 1975, the Iraqi regime destroyed 150 villages in Shangal and forced residents to resettle in collective towns.
As part of the Arabization process, the Iraqi government forcefully changed the identity of many Yezidi Kurds and registered them as Arabs. Poor Shiite Arabs were also moved to largely Kurdish areas in northern Iraq to upset the demographic balance in ethnically mixed Kurdish strongholds.