Zulfiqar Haider Salman has been appointed as the new mayor of Tuzkhurmatu district in Salahaddin province.
Zulfiqar, a Shiite Turkmen, was elected on Tuesday, September 17th, as part of an agreement between the parties.
Before taking on this role, he served as the director of the health care department in the Kirkuk health Office.
Following the distribution and agreement of the winning parties from the last provincial council elections held on December 18, 2013, Turkmen received the majority of positions in Tuzkhurmatu with 65%, followed by Arabs with 25% and Kurds with 10%.
This division was the result of ongoing negotiations and meetings between the Arab, Kurdish, and Turkmen communities in the Salahaddin provincial council.
Turkmen, the third largest ethnic group in Iraq after Arabs and Kurds, are spread across the country, residing almost exclusively in the northern towns and villages stretching from Tal Afar through Mosul, Erbil, the center of Kirkuk, and Altun Kopri district, Tuz Khurmatu of Salahaddin and Kifri and Khanaqin in Diyala. They are all Muslims, half Sunnis and half Shiites.
Though there are no official records about the Turkmen in Kirkuk, the Turkmen political parties say there are over 200,000 Turkmen voters in Kirkuk which has been divided into three constituencies for 12 seats in the October 10th, 2021 General Elections.
Yasin Mohammed, a Kurdish member of the provincial council, stated that Turkmen took the positions of the mayor and police chief, while Arabs filled in positions of municipality and education directors and a Kurd was appointed as director of local hospital.
The multi-ethnic district of Duz Khurmatu, located 70 kilometers south of Kirkuk and part of Salahaddin province, is the only disputed town of the province and one of the disputed territories between Erbil and Baghdad, home to 154,000 Turkmens, Kurds and Arabs.
The Kurds held the position of mayor of Tuz Khurmatu District for about 10 years, but after the events of October 16, 2017, they lost the position and many other positions, after the withdrawal of the Peshmerga and other Kurdish forces from the district following the deterioration of relations between the federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government KRG due to the independence referendum in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region IKR. The Iraqi Security Forces ISF ousted the Kurdish parties and the Peshmarga. Thousands of families were displaced and hundreds of Kurdish citizens' homes and shops were burned.
The predominantly Sunni province of Salahaddin, about 135 kilometers north of the Iraqi capital, once home for Saddam Hussein, is under the control of Iraqi Security Forces ISF including the Shia-led paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces PMF, known as al-Hashid al-Shabi.
*This story has been produced as part of the 'Budget is Your Right' initiative, with support from the National Democratic Institute (NDI).
