FAILI KURDS

   This is a group of some 150,000 Kurds originally from the Kirmanshah region in Iran, who had lived in Iraq (many in Baghdad) since Ottoman times but without Iraqi citizenship. In the late 1970s, the Iraqi government expelled at least 50,000 of them on the grounds that they were not Iraqi citizens.

   During the time of the March (1970) Manifesto the Iraqi government refused to approve the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) nominee, Habib Karim, as vice president of Iraq under terms of Article 12 of the Manifesto, on the grounds that Karim, a Faili Kurd, was of Iranian origin. The Faili Kurds were thus one specific element of the Iraqi policy of Arabization that sought to reduce Kurdish population numbers and thus their influence in Iraq in favor of the Arabs. The Faili Kurds also joined many other Kurds as refugees in Iran. In 2009, the Iraqi government announced that it would grant Iraqi nationality to the Faili Kurds who had been denaturalized by the Saddam Hussein regime.