In most cities, a dispute over state-owned land would be an administrative nuisance. In Kirkuk, it becomes a reckoning with ethnic cleansing, oil and a constitution that Baghdad has spent two decades avoiding.
Residents of the Arafa neighbourhood have learned that a house can remain standing for a generation and still be considered a temporary violation by the state. Returning Kurdish families repaired abandoned buildings, raised children and attained the normal conditions of a settled life to encounter subsequent orders of arrest, warrants for removal and risk of house demolition or confiscation by the state-owned North Oil Company. These events are an extension of the controversy. Recent reporting described approximately 2000 Kurdish families in Arafa as at risk for eviction and legal action.
Earlier reports applied to smaller groups: 70 families living in 40 houses were involved in the controversy over warrants for removal in 2024 and 2026; investigation in 2022 identified 250 families in the section of Arafa known as al-Musaiyajah; and reports from 2017 described 280 Kurdish families under threat of eviction. These represent different blocks of houses, various legal proceedings and stages of enforcement. There is no publicly available record to confirm that each of the 2000 families is subject to an individual warrant. However, the conflict has expanded to encompass a major threat to a large segment of the population.
The resulting legal situation is apparently straightforward. Ownership of the land is vested in the North Oil Company, a concern of the federal Ministry of Oil. A court recognised ownership by this company and required implementation of the decision by the authorities of Kirkuk. Residents lacked conventional records of ownership and generally requested either permission to purchase or to register ownership of the land, or provision of compensation and alternative housing before removal.
Eviction should not be dismissed merely because the families involved are sympathetic. Public property cannot be converted to private ownership by occupation alone. Iraq has hundreds of thousands of unauthorised buildings, and the number of illegal houses and commercial properties in the province exceeded 60,000 in 2022. Ultimately, land distribution reflects not the rule of law but the ability of particular politicians, militia forces, real estate agents or political parties to appropriate land first. However, Arafa is no ordinary squatter settlement, because Kirkuk is no ordinary city.
Most Kurdish residents were expelled from Kirkuk or adjacent districts under conditions of Baathist Arabization and returned after 2003 to find their former homes occupied, destroyed or legally inaccessible. They subsequently occupied unfinished or abandoned buildings associated with the former regime and with petroleum activities. One resident described his return to the city after 2003 and construction of two small rooms; others achieved skeletal construction and have lived in their homes for more than 20 years. This certainly does not justify their occupation as lawful, but greatly reduces the perceived moral validity of the position of the state. The situation is not comparable with a confrontation with families that arrived only 2 days ago and occupied space around a pipeline.
Instead, it represents confrontation with individuals whose previous status had been tolerated by successive governments, elections and regimes of security control. Basic services were provided to some unauthorised districts before intervention by federal authorities. Patients invested whatever limited resources they had in the construction of walls, roofs, utilities and enterprises. The resulting condition of permanent illegality finally forced the government to seek and reacquire its title to the property.
The dispute came close to confrontation in January 2026. Police reportedly directed 70 Kurdish families to surrender to warrants issued in response to a complaint by the state oil company. The governor of Kirkuk ordered police not to enter Arafa until resolution of the conflict by the federal government. Officers warned that they would return to enforce the warrants. Additional reports described restrictions on travel and on interactions with government officials, and documented multiple arrests of some residents.
The representative of the community was detained in 2024 and released on bail after five days. He was charged under article 36 of a law enacted in 1994, but details of the statute, its application and the complete records of the case were not available in readily accessible reports. In effect, the warrants represented continuation of proceedings against defendants who had failed to appear for proceedings initiated by the company and thus were treated as fugitives. As a consequence, the account of the legal proceedings was incomplete. Information on ownership was more complete than information on the criminal basis for arrest of residents.
This difference was important because a requirement that persons surrender property constitutes a civil rather than a criminal action. Conversion of an entire dispute over property into mechanisms of warrants, blocked documentation and arrest at roadblocks represented a criminal response to conditions of poverty and displacement. Finally, it converted a potential dispute amenable to resolution by compensation into an ethnic conflict.
Kurdish residents of Kirkuk charge precisely that. They state that unauthorised Arab and Turkmen construction exists elsewhere in the city without generating comparable concern, and that enforcement has focused primarily on Kurdish areas. These allegations have been reiterated in numerous local reports, but have not been substantiated by complete records of enforcement activity. The North Oil Company has provided little information regarding the necessity for recovery of these particular properties, and referred all questions to the Ministry of Oil.
There is no documented basis for the requirement that Arafa be recovered. In particular, no named pipeline, security zone or development project is known to require Arafa.
This does not confirm an element of discrimination. However, conditions of opacity continue to constitute a high degree of political sensitivity. The company is perceived not merely as a landlord, but as one of the major instruments by which Baghdad has controlled the oil economy of the city. Under conditions of Baathist rule, access to employment, housing and property by Kurds was deliberately restricted. A recent description of the situation cited the statement of a Kurdish official that only 18 of approximately 11,000 employees of the oil company prior to 2003 were of Kurdish origin.
The accuracy of this figure reflects the extent of political bias rather than the results of an independent audit. Nevertheless, it illustrates why the experience of Kurdish residents with litigation to recover Arafa is not equivalent to experience with corporate management of property.
The overall stakes for oil remain enormous. The Kirkuk fields were discovered in the 1920s and contain an estimated 9 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Baghdad has negotiated a multi-billion-dollar agreement with BP to redevelop four fields, whereas the government of the Kurdish Regional Government insists that decisions about resources in disputed territory cannot be made unilaterally. There is no evidence of direct association between the BP project and the evictions of Arafa. However, the fact that an oil company is seeking possession of property in a country for which constitutional status and oil wealth remain unresolved imparts a degree of strategic significance to even an otherwise legitimate claim of property ownership.
The ultimate cause of this situation is Article 140 of the constitution. This was intended to eliminate precisely this type of conflict. Under its provisions, the executive was to complete the “normalisation” of areas affected by Arabization, conduct a census and obtain the results of a referendum reflecting the desires of inhabitants of Kirkuk and other disputed areas. The resulting obligations were to be fulfilled by 31 December 2007, but remained unimplemented. Finally, in 1999, the court concluded that article 140 continued in force until all of its requirements and objectives had been achieved.
The deadline for implementation has expired, but the obligation remains unfulfilled. This represents the constitutional paradox underlying Arafa. Iraq has avoided a collective resolution of Kirkuk, but has permitted individual courts, ministries and security agencies to achieve a resolution on a house-by-house basis. As a result, every act of eviction, agricultural contract, government construction project and municipal boundary constitutes a de facto referendum in the absence of voting.
Baghdad is correct in noting that article 140 does not confer ownership of all state lands occupied by returning Kurds. Kurdish parties also are correct in describing the continuation of some effects of Arabization and penalties for persons displaced by those effects. Both conclusions may well be valid. The failure of Iraq reflects its refusal to establish an institution capable of reconciling them.
There is, however, already potential for compromise through legal mechanisms. Implementation of federal cabinet decision 320 in 2022 provided mechanisms for reclassifying and selling to residents certain state-owned agricultural lands occupied by well-established residential communities. Application of the implementing regulations also extended to lands owned by state institutions and public enterprises, but excluded lands required for public-benefit projects or for essential infrastructure. Implementation of the decision was initiated in 2023, and the degree to which Arafa meets the requirements for cadastral recognition will depend on the extent of use of the lands for oil operations and on the willingness of the appropriate ministry to transfer them.
Resolution of these issues has not yet been made public, and represents an appropriate starting point for government action. Publication of cadastral records, identification of parcels involved in litigation, determination of the numbers of households affected by civil orders and of individuals subject to criminal charges, and specification of the extent of need for use of the lands by the company should be accomplished as a prerequisite for formation of a joint commission with representatives of the administration of Kirkuk, of the ministries of oil and migration, of residents and of independent attorneys specializing in property law. The resulting separation of recent commercial encroachments from long-standing humanitarian requirements should ultimately be of substantial benefit to both residents and the government.
Where land is available for oil operations or public infrastructure, occupants should be offered the opportunity to purchase or obtain long-term tenure in accordance with transparent procedures. When complete recovery is truly required, eviction should be preceded by compensation and provision of adequate alternative housing, not preceded by those actions. Outstanding claims of continued occupancy by residents should be suspended pending negotiation.
The resulting agreement would not validate all Kurdish claims, nor would it impair the legality of property owned by the North Oil Company. Rather, it would reflect a more fundamental reality: After 20 years of official tolerance, the state has responsibilities as well as rights. The risk of large-scale eviction is not simply that families will become homeless, but also that the Kurdish population will perceive another episode in a well-known pattern of displacement under Saddam, promises of constitutional rights after Saddam, continued postponement of decisions by Baghdad and ultimately reimposition of coercive measures in the name of legality.
Arab and Turkmen residents, in contrast, will regard any special measures as equivalent to approval of post-2003 “Kurdification.” As a consequence, one neighbourhood represents evidence for entirely incompatible historical experiences. In a normal city, resolution of these controversies would be achieved by reference to the land registry. In Kirkuk, it merely indicates the point at which the controversy begins.
Consequently, the experience of Arafa is of major importance. The tragedy of Kirkuk is not a lack of laws, but rather an absence of a political settlement sufficient to define the requirements of justice for the existing legal system.
